Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  Cope raised a pained eyebrow at Ben, and pointed to the screen. “May I select ‘Mobile’ yet?” The silvery screen, after hours of labor, displayed a jagged grey Colony Corps logo, and a simple choice: ‘Home,’ or ‘Mobile.’ A third option labeled ‘Repeater’ was greyed out.

  Ben frowned at the screen, arms crossed. “OK, you think ‘Home’ means Sanctuary, ‘Mobile’ is Nanomage, and ‘Repeater’ is our little friend with the horns here. That makes sense.” The ship hadn’t been named Nanomage at the time, and all this tech came from the world of Sanctuary. “Go for it.”

  “Wait!” Elise squeaked too late. An impatient Cope had already selected ‘Mobile’ for the starship currently on Denali.

  “Did the EM field change from that?” the engineer inquired.

  “No,” Elise conceded. Teke confirmed this.

  Cope and Ben studied the next silvery screen. It said, ‘Sending…’ After a moment this advanced to ‘Receiver found…’

  “Hello,” Teke murmured. “Wow.” He and Elise put their heads together, marveling at some evolution in their sensors. They didn’t choose to share details at present.

  Cope looked back to the screen as the advisory advanced to ‘Handshaking complete.’

  83

  Suddenly the grey scale quantum transceiver display altered to show a cluttered room, uninhabited. This wasn’t the smaller spaceship Nanomage. Cope frowned in concentration, soaking in details. Not a living room, possibly an office. “It’s a lab. I think. Science, not engineering, but sort of both.”

  “But is it a lab on Denali?” Ben prompted.

  Cope sighed. “Could be anywhere.” The engineer was no stranger to such labs, including on Denali and Mahina. “Do you hear that?”

  “Static?” Ben suggested.

  The other two crowded in to study the screen. On a cluttered desk, something suddenly hopped, no bigger than Cope’s fingertip.

  Teke leaned forward intently. “Turn the volume up?”

  Cope did so. The ‘static’ grew louder, sort of a rustling squeak, with bleeps, repeating but not periodic. Engineers were connoisseurs of odd noises.

  Teke stepped back and broke into a broad grin. Cheering reached them from the galley, including Zan’s distinctive hunter yell of triumph.

  “OK, explain?” Cope requested.

  Teke pointed to the strange little lump that moved. “That’s a peeper frog. The sound is frogs and crickets singing at night. This room is definitely on Denali.”

  “A Denali monster indoors?” Ben asked.

  Teke chuckled. “Hell, no. These are Earth creatures. Genetically modified to live in our agriculture domes. We grow up with frogs and crickets singing us to sleep. Quire and I want Eli to make us some. I thought maybe Sock would like them as a gift. I don’t know if the creche would allow him to keep pets, though.”

  “No. Absolutely not,” Cope supplied. “But he’s not in a creche anymore.”

  Ben looked the creatures up on his tab, echoing the picture on another corner of the big display. The tiny brown peeper frog looked like something only a Denali could love. He recoiled from the horrifying cricket, then peered closer in revolted fascination. “Maybe you could talk Dad into the frog. Not this thing.”

  “The frogs eat the crickets,” Teke explained. “They live in the fish pools as babies, tadpoles. But when they turn into frogs, they need to eat insects. We give them crickets. Or katydids. They all sing.”

  “And what do the insects eat?” Cope inquired.

  “I fed them sweet potatoes,” the physicist replied. “You get in trouble for letting the insects loose, and have to catch them by ear. We let the peepers roam free, though. Not just in the ag domes, either. This room looks like Sora’s office. She liked peepers.”

  “Sora,” Cope echoed. The name sounded familiar.

  Teke smiled at him. “Scholar Sora. You remember. I interned with her at the Advanced Materials Lab.”

  “Where we met you!” Cope agreed. “Oh, I liked her!”

  The rest of the capital city of Denali Prime was buried under a volcanic pyroclastic flow. The Thrive and Nanomage crews struggled for weeks helping to dig out desperate survivors, stranded for months, their air and water and cooling systems exhausted, rationing their food. But then they checked an outlier, a hollow spot in the field of ash far from the main city. There Sora and her crew sat in perfect health, in a lovely research dome community with all the amenities. Then 17-year-old Teke was out laying cable that day along a stream bed, trying to reach a hilltop so they could contact another city by radio.

  Teke shook his head, still smiling. He aped a falsetto. “‘That should be a chi, not a phi, Teke. Bad enough you make up your own mathematics, and then need to invent another to check your work. You must learn to obey conventions!’ I thought she was a harridan. She demanded I work to my potential. Busted my chops for everything. Best teacher I ever had. Present company excepted, Cope.”

  “I barely understand what you’re saying half the time.”

  Teke didn’t bother to argue. He contemplated the antlers, his expression growing wistful. “You know, I bet that’s Sora’s lab. Who better to study this alloy?”

  “I have spoken to her,” Elise agreed. “When I make my onyx cat. I send Sora pictures of the antlers. I share what I learn with her. Maybe after that, she is curious and visits Nanomage to find this metal. She is the best materials person on Denali, maybe the Aloha system.”

  In Cope’s opinion, Elise was the best such scientist in the system, now that he knew her. Mahina borrowed Elise to play catch-up in that field. A Denali scientist didn’t specialize like a Saggy, not on an industrial topic. Scholar Sora was a gardener, keeper of peeper frogs, and teacher to a wayward young physicist. Elise Pointreau focused on her true passion.

  “Well, she isn’t home, if this is Sora’s lab,” Cope pointed out. “What time is it there?”

  Ben checked his pocket tab for the time zone conversion. “Just after supper, 19:37. No, wait, it’s autumn on Denali.” Only the northern polar region was inhabited on the hot inner planet. During polar autumn, they enjoyed both night and day for a couple swift months. The locals used a 20-hour clock to track the daily sun then, and a more Earth-normal 24 hours for human comfort in summer and winter, when the sun was either up all the time, or missing completely. “After bed-time, Friday. Dusk.” The Mahina translation of Friday served to remind Cope.

  Teke confided that Sora wasn’t an early riser, especially on Denali Saturday. She might not work in her lab that day. They’d have to try her again in the evening Mahina time.

  “Did you get the confirmation we needed?” Cope asked Teke, as he turned off the moose-bot.

  “Not all we could learn,” Teke conceded. “It’s very promising.”

  Cope considered this. “We still don’t know that it’s synchronous communication.”

  “Wait, is it light out?” Ben suggested.

  They rewound Kassidy’s recording to check. At 19:30 in the autumn on this particular day, it should be full dark on Denali. Yet in a time-lagged picture, the sun might still be setting. But no luck – the room showed no evidence of outdoor light. Though it was hard to tell from a gray-on-gray image. One flat stretch could be a dark window, or a dark wall. Teke couldn’t identify the room.

  “We could call her,” Cope suggested. “Maybe not drag her out of bed, but set a time to expect our call. Give her both lagged and unlagged times.”

  “No, we can’t,” Ben pointed out. “Pono’s in the way for a few days.”

  Teke suddenly shrieked and lifted a laughing Elise by the waist into the air. Cope felt the grin blossoming on his face. He held Ben by the jaw and kissed him hard. “You’re awesome!”

  “I agree,” an amused Ben allowed. “But why?”

  “We have no line of sight to Denali. Don’t you see? This device communicated through a rego gas giant. As though it wasn’t there.”

  Ben’s eyebrows flew up. He mouthed an Oh. He was gorgeous
and brilliant and wonderful, and he stood by Cope’s side for the greatest challenge of his engineering career. Cope had to drop his gaze to rein in the overflowing emotions welling up. Not now.

  “I say we load up the skiff!” Teke insisted.

  Cope nodded slowly and raised a finger. “Transfer the gear. We still wait for confirmation of synchrony before we test.” Then he shook his head, grinning, and abandoned his elder note of caution. “Rego hell, Teke. Your theory works!”

  He fell on his younger protege and co-father for a hug, proud to bursting. Teke lifted him into the air with a hoot, just like Elise, and then Ben as well.

  “Where does this go?” Eli asked tentatively, entering the skiff with his box. The botanist was agile enough at the EVA game, playing ball inside the hold, surrounded by good atmosphere. But outside the ship in a pressure suit, he still felt breathless, aware of every movement, every sound, every risk. His air supply hissed, redolent with the cleaning vinegar employed to keep algae at bay. He crept into the cramped space, door open to infinity. He awkwardly clutched his contribution while trying to maintain magnetic anchor with his clumsy boots.

  “Eli, my man!” Ben greeted him, the only tech on board for the moment. “Don’t usually see you out here.” He tightened a bolt that held a single pilot’s chair in place. Eli supposed they removed that for convenience while installing the extensive collection of sensors and the motive force. A remote-controlled skiff didn’t need a chair. For the first test, there would be no one aboard.

  “No,” Eli agreed. “I don’t think I’ll ever be casual about EVA. I can forget inside the ship. But out here… It’s such a thin layer of fabric between me and death. Just one misstep and I could fly off to die alone in the dark, surrounded by stars.”

  “Agoraphobia,” Ben agreed. “Took me nearly a year to outgrow it on Thrive. Then a day came when I couldn’t tolerate giving in to the fear. I had people on the line, things I must do. I was third officer on a spaceship. Time to own that. Someday maybe you’ll find that motivation.”

  “You were afraid of space?” Eli replied wonderingly. “Yet you…”

  Ben chuckled. “Yup. I embraced it. My life!” He started around the bolts again for their final tightening. Relative to Eli, his legs angled 60 degrees up from the floor, bracing against the front equipment panel. Done with the fasteners, he rotated helmet up in typical zero-g slow motion. Now braced with his butt and gloves on the console, he pushed his feet with all his might against the chair back, then kicked its armrests. “Good enough,” he concluded in satisfaction.

  The captain finally turned his attention to Eli’s box. “What is it? And what kind of hookups do you need?”

  “Power. Optionally water. This is my biological test module. Pressurized.”

  “How very cool! Whatcha got in there?” He drifted closer to peer at the prize in Eli’s arms.

  Eli pressed a button to turn on the internal lights, and rotated the object to turn an observation window toward Ben. “A mustard plant, seeds, and frog embryos. Those are in the jar.”

  Ben grinned at him. “Would those be Denali singing frogs?”

  “Quire talked me into it. Before we used the antlers to call a frog.”

  Ben laughed. “No crickets I hope.”

  “Not yet,” Eli conceded. “But they’ll never sing without insects to eat. Of all the Earth species to be wary of introducing, insects top the list. I like the song of katydids. Another insect.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. The sound was really nice though. Strange, but familiar somehow. Soothing. Let’s try the galley. No water hookups. You’ll have to refresh by hand. A few days?”

  “That’s fine,” Eli replied. Ben darted aft through freefall like a silvery fish. The botanist followed deliberately, magnet to magnet. The ‘galley’ proved to be a closet-like workstation with ‘standing’ room for one. Most amenities were missing, so it did offer a bit of counter space.

  Ben accepted the module and verified that it was too large to fit under a cabinet. He handed it back and set out to remove the empty cabinet. Eli was about to offer to leave and come back later, but the task proved quicker than he expected. The captain unlatched the storage compartment with a screwdriver, and popped it off the wall. Eli only needed to move out of the way as Ben set the retired fitting into the slender hallway.

  The captain took the bio module from him again to set in his cleared spot. He didn’t immediately reach for the power. He rummaged his tool belt.

  Feeling lonely and useless, Eli turned to go.

  Ben interrupted. “Pass me my tool box, would you? I need fasteners to secure this. So how are you doing with our divorce from humanity? You were pretty quiet during the meeting.”

  “Hard to get a word in edgewise.” A few ponderous strides returned Eli to the ‘bridge.’ He studied the floor, then realized the toolbox hovered in an overhead corner out of Ben’s way. He tried to swat it down with his arm, then remembered to simply reorient his frame of reference. Two steps up the wall and he had it. For fun, he tried to continue on the wall, but the central passageway was too narrow. Still, he felt better for having played with the situation.

  “You have my full attention,” the captain prodded.

  “Hm? Oh, being out of communication. That doesn’t really change anything for me. I trust you. You’ll find safe harbor before we run out of fuel. In the meantime I keep my head down and enjoy my sabbatical. Looking forward to this test.”

  “You’re not embroiled in Kassidy and Hunter’s scheme?” Those two busily plotted how to leak their scandalous material over time for maximum damage.

  “Bring down Carmack?” Eli passed him the toolbox. “No. I did my part.”

  “I know what you mean. Yes, I think what Carmack is doing to Mahina’s economy is unconscionable. No, it’s not my job to fix the government. Politics. Eh.”

  “Exactly. Am I in your way?”

  Ben glanced at him in surprise, then smiled warmly. “Never. Eli, we’ve never been close. That’s only because you like plants better than me.” He laughed.

  “Really?” Eli pressed. He accepted the toolbox back, and set it to hover placidly with the discarded kitchen cabinet. “I’d like to stay,” he blurted.

  Ben glanced at him again. “Stay for a week, a year, a life. I can’t promise how long I’ll own the Prosper. But you’re always welcome with me and mine. Count on it.”

  Eli wondered if it was possible for him to accept that friendship. He felt he should refuse this offer promptly, profess that he was fine and needed no help. Instead he slowly said, “Thank you. That means a lot to me.” He felt like he was pushing Ben away, not embracing the friendship. It was maddening.

  Ben studied his face searchingly. “You know, Eli, for some, this ship is just a corridor in life. One door closes and another opens. Just know that we appreciate you, OK? When it comes your time to leave again, we’ll cheer you on your way. To me, that’s what home is.”

  “I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me,” Eli blurted again, surprising himself.

  The captain beamed at him. “Good. Fasteners done. Check your box. Then we plug her in.”

  “Are we going to find safe harbor?” Eli hazarded.

  “Absolutely. If all else fails, we can reach Denali. Not very quickly. But once our tests are done, we announce. Findings or failure. Then we’re in the public eye and start negotiating. I hope.”

  Eli nodded, as a tension fell from his shoulders he hadn’t realized he was bearing. They’d be alright then. He awkwardly swapped places and peeked through the window on his experiment. His tiny scraps of life were also safe, snugly cocooned in his pocket life support module. Perhaps he could trust the Prosper was safe in Someone’s hands as well. If not, Ben’s hands were good enough.

  Wilder rapped Judge on the helmet with a knuckle. “Off.”

  That man was a pain in the spacer’s rear. How did a security goon outrank a chief petty officer, anyway? But Judge removed the helmet with a false
smile. He was doing something underhanded, after all, even if the guard wasn’t wise to him. “Just listening to some tunes while I work, sarge.”

  “Yeah? Don’t.” Wilder continued on to check Willow’s handiwork.

  “Keeps out the vinegar fumes,” Judge prattled on merrily, just to annoy the wanker. “Never seen crew to blow out air hoses each time a suit’s worn.”

  “Guess Captain Acosta values your life,” Wilder retorted. “The Vultures don’t. The quality of a skiff should have been your first clue.”

  Judge conceded the point. But this is a colossal waste of time. On a Ring Ventures mining skiff, they cleaned their suits once a week. Granted, the reek could stun a man from ten paces by then. They wore those suits 84 hours straight on a 4 day shift, latrine on board.

  Wilder moseyed on. Judge ruminated on what he’d overheard on the comm channel. Most helmets didn’t offer the command eavesdropping feature, but he happened to be cleaning Copeland’s gear. Skiff leaders snooped all the time.

  What were ‘frog embryos,’ anyway? He tried to ask Quire, but the quiet Buddha shook his head and slipped away. Too damned many quips about frogs flying past his ears these past couple days. Judge possessed a fine eighth grade education from the Southern Crescent settlements, renowned as the most ignorant colonists on all Mahina, and that was saying something. Frogs? Never heard of them, and from context, couldn’t figure out what kind of device that might be. Mustard plant? Only mustard he knew was that yellow goop you squeezed from a tube. They couldn’t mean that.

  Never mind that. The main thing, there was a whole lot more secrecy now. He and Willow were practically locked in the engine room yesterday. Things were coming to a boil.

  Denali. Rego hell. Judge knew their supply levels. They topped up at Hell’s Bells, but didn’t load extra fuel containers. If they shot for the inner planet, and hoped to have enough left to land, they’d need a slow ballistic passage. Could take a year to get there! Longer, if the planets weren’t aligned.