by Ginger Booth
“Or visit her,” Teke agreed. “The thief who stole the micro warp survived. That’s promising for micro warp space travel. We need to continue our experiments. As a Denali, the most pressing question for me is not reaching Sanctuary, but my home world. Opening up trade with Denali from the Pono subsystem would be huge. And on a personal level – it’s been 12 years. I’d love to see home again someday.”
Elise petted him.
“Ooh, you said ‘personal,’” Kassidy teased. “Tell us a little about you, Scholar Teke! Everyone knows that you’re in some kind of sexy threesome. With your collaborator, the president of Spaceways, John Copeland. And the captain of the Prosper, Ben Acosta.”
Teke laughed out loud. “Everyone knows wrong, then.” Elise cuddled him closer and kissed his ear. “At the moment, I’m quite enjoying the company of Elise Pointreau. No. Cope and Ben used to be married. I’m single. I’m sperm donor to one of their children. I understand the confusion, but no. Not a threesome!”
Kassidy had pictures at the ready. “Aren’t they adorable! The Copeland-Acosta-Teke brood. The youngest is Teke’s little boy, Socrates. I’ve met the little whipper-snapper –”
“Kassidy, no,” Teke interrupted. “I forbid it. You will not broadcast the children. They’re entitled to their privacy. So are we. No one needs clarification on who’s sleeping with whom. Especially Ben and Cope. Are you trying to hurt them?”
Kassidy stopped the recording and pursed her lips. “This is public relations, Teke. To cover our asses. This one segment could explode coverage by a factor of ten.”
Teke crooked an eyebrow and steepled his fingers. “Happy to die in obscurity. Bet I won’t.”
“No,” Kassidy allowed. In physics, they called the big theories by the name of the discoverer. They’d probably name some arcane unit of warping fractal frondiness after him, too – nano-Tekes and kilo-Tekes. She dutifully erased her juiciest material, and forced her smile on straight again.
“And there you have it! The inventor of –”
“John Copeland is the inventor,” Teke corrected her. “I’m a theoretical physicist.”
Kassidy sighed and erased again. “And there you have it! Scholar Teke of Denali, the physics genius behind Thrive Spaceways’ successful micro warp drive! And his brilliant Sagamore collaborator Elise Pointreau. Still early days. But this breakthrough could change everything!”
She clicked off the recorder. “That’s it! You did great. When do we call Sass, anyway?”
89
Ben finished fastening his new copper mesh cage over the control circuits box of Prosper’s star drive.
Willow waited patiently to get his attention, then handed him another fried circuit. “From ventilation, sar. Dead as a doornail. What’s with the mesh?”
Ben selected a multi-tester from his toolbox and verified the circuit she’d handed him. “Protection against it happening again. We got another of these in stores?” The hand-sized circuit board was indeed dead overall, but Ben suspected only the microprocessor was fried.
“I didn’t stock parts to rebuild the whole ship,” Willow defended.
Ben tapped the offending component. “Microprocessor, Willow. Look it up.”
“Oh.” She got busy with her tablet. “Yeah, I can find one of those. So what happened here?”
“The…fractal rip or whatever…threw out a massive mess of radiation, all wavelengths, all kinds. The frond that touched us included a trace of something called E1 radiation. Of course, this is a spaceship. Every component should be hardened to radiation, all kinds. And the hull and ESD field outside should have shielded us from everything. But somehow the E1 got through.”
Willow checked her tablet again. “No glitches on the ESD field.”
Ben reflected that he rather enjoyed having the services of the first mate again. Willow knew his ship. She knew how engineers thought about fixing things, what to check and how to get at it. He wished he could trust her. Zan squatted nearby, dogging her steps.
“No.” Ben straightened up from his crouch. “It’s like the frond wasn’t radiating out from the micro warp, but emerging everywhere from nowhere. It never went through the hull. It manifested inside. Not sure how far from the warp that phenomenon spread.” He tapped his own tablet. “On my list for the physicist. But fetch me that processor, will you? Now for restarting the star drive. Wish me luck.”
Willow tarried, as Ben initiated the warmup sequence, eyes glued to the power signature. He blew out a long breath and dropped his head in relief. Normal!
“You did it?” Willow exclaimed.
“Hey, don’t act so surprised!” Ben laughed. A few more minutes, and he could arrest their slow orbital decay toward the deadly maelstrom of Pono.
“But I am surprised,” Willow offered softly. “I had no idea you could do this. Copeland is legendary as a starship engineer. And he couldn’t figure it out.”
Ben flicked her a quick sad smile. “He learned by doing. I have an education. He would have found it eventually.” He wasn’t sure that was true. He was far more experienced in space than Cope by now.
“Ben, I’m sorry,” Willow continued. “I thought… I had no idea you were doing something big and important out here. Spaceways, Vultures, I thought, ‘What’s the difference? Money-grubbers in it for profits.’ But you’re not.”
“No, Spaceways isn’t in it for the money. Abel and Jules Greer, they’re like the only Thrive alumni who ever knew their way around a credit. Kassidy sometimes, too. The rest of us want to save the worlds. Different angles of attack, but we also serve who keep the boat flying.”
“If there’s anything I can do…” she hazarded.
“A processor, Mr. Arbuckle,” Ben reminded her.
“Right.” She turned to go.
“Willow, you’re off the hook. I’ll let you go next time I get the chance. With a full data sweep again, of course, and no wages. Trust is earned. When you break it, trust takes a long time to repair. Sometimes can’t be done.”
His thoughts on that last drifted to his breakup with Cope, not Willow. Damn he was tired. He forced his thoughts back to the ex first mate. “I think we can be friends again some day. As much as we ever were. But let’s rebuild that trust from a distance, alright?”
“Understood. But I’m sorry. I wish I’d been a part of this, instead of… Sorry.”
He nodded, eyes askance, granting provisional acknowledgment, if not quite accepting the apology. He flicked his fingers to remind her she had a part to fetch.
The star drive continued coming online smoothly. He belatedly remembered to douse its light so he wouldn’t get scorched standing here. Then he hailed Cope and gave him the good news that he had power restored, and might have ventilation back soon. He worried that he’d hurt the engineer’s feelings. He needn’t have.
“What the hell is E1 radiation?” Cope queried. “And how did it get past the ESD shield?”
Ben explained again. “I don’t think it passed through the shield. It just manifested here out of nothing. What else on the ship might not be hardened against an electromagnetic pulse?”
“Anything replaced in the past hundred years. Or built to groundside consumer standards. Tried the soy printer yet?”
“Aw, hell,” Ben acknowledged, and added kitchen appliances to his to-check list. Ship diagnostics didn’t report fridge status.
“Captain!” Eli hailed him. “Judge is awake in med bay. You need to hear this, Ben.”
“On my way.”
Judge looked immensely improved, lying strapped into the auto-doc. As in, Ben could look at his face without retching. “Welcome back to the living!” Eli ceded the attendant’s seat for him. “What did I need to hear, Eli?”
“Sequence of events, sar,” the botanist supplied.
Ben looked to Judge. “Oh?”
“Fire on the skiff, sar,” Judge supplied. “That wasn’t the… What was that? That was no rego star drive!”
“No,” Ben agreed. Th
ere was no point withholding information from Judge any longer, at least not what Kassidy already plastered over the news. “Normal third generation star drive. The propulsion test was a ‘micro warp.’ New warp technology we can use inside a star system. And we won’t lose years of objective time by warping light years, either.”
“Rego hell!” Judge breathed, eyes wide. “You really aren’t like Vultures.”
Ben scowled. Again with this. Both of them? “Ring Ventures is a for-profit enterprise, engaged in resource extraction in the rings. Thrive Spaceways’ mission is to develop new space technologies, and repair spacecraft. My Prosper branch also engages in inter-colony trade and transport. Spaceways downsized to focus on advanced R&D, this new warp. No, we’re not the same.”
“I just meant – never mind.”
“Sequence of events?” Ben reminded him sourly.
“Oh. I caused the fire, not the…micro warp? The big light show. That came after.”
Ben leaned forward, his attention riveted. “Tell me.”
“I spilled some water,” Judge croaked. “Brought an extra gallon. Didn’t want to top up in the cargo hold where anybody could see. Waited til I got into the skiff. Then you surprised me, boiling out of the trapdoor so fast-like. I got back to the water after I was well away.”
Ben visualized this, globules of water dancing through the air. In vacuum, they boiled away pretty fast, but not instantly. He insisted all suits be recharged promptly, ready to go. But they held up to five liters of water. This was overkill since the suits recycled. The sloshing extra mass was a nuisance on EVA. So Prosper standard was two liters, not full. Judge had bitched to him about that. He insisted the correct procedure was to always max out a safety measure.
Judge continued, “Then the skiff came alive, shaking all rough. I left the water in mid-air, like what the hell, you know? Went back to the engine room. Some other globs were in the air – Well, not air. You know what I mean.”
“Yes. What color?”
“Amber,” Judge supplied. “Engine fuel.”
“Shit,” Ben acknowledged, wincing. “Go on.”
“Well, you got it. Did you ever pressure test the fuel tanks?” Judge asked. “They leak on those damned skiffs.”
“No,” Ben admitted, heart sinking. “So the water hit fuel and kaboom?”
“Right. Blasted me back to the bridge. I was screaming. The flash heat must have half burned my eyelids off. Split the hull. I hooked myself into the chair to call for help. Then the view out the window exploded into… God, it was beautiful. Or maybe I was hallucinating. My suit’s got that new auto-med feature.”
Ben nodded. “The light show was awe-inspiring. Fractal whorls, arcs like psychedelic soap bubbles, blues and greens, lightning and throbbing purples. As though another universe emanated forth from the void, Creation unfolding before our eyes.”
“Yeah, cap,” Judge critiqued, “saying junk like that makes you sound frill, you know?” He amended hastily, “No offense.”
The man was at Ben’s mercy, and strapped immobile to a bed. Mouthing off wasn’t smart. “I won’t kill you for it.” He considered the story. “So you don’t think the warp cracked open the hull?”
“No, definitely,” Judge replied. “That was the fuel flash fire. Not all the fuel, mind you. There’d be no skiff left, or me to tell you, if all the fuel blew. Maybe a hundred milliliters. But it was enough to break bulkheads and see stars shining through.”
Ben found a picture of from the inside of the skiff’s engine compartment now. “This bad? Just from the fire?”
“The nozzles flew out,” Judge said, pointing. “And this big split I remember. Shaking like crazy. But I was up in the bow. Metal was still groaning when I passed out. But the damage came before the light show. No, the lights were like I died, and Heaven opened up to take me.”
“Expecting Heaven, are you?” Ben couldn’t help it.
“Hey, I try to do good,” Judge quavered. “Mostly.”
Ben barked a laugh. “Regular saint. Thanks, Eli. Good call. Hey, did anything survive in your module?”
“Everything,” Eli replied happily. “Growth curves uninterrupted, cellular structure intact, molecular function sound. The plant got cooked, but it’ll bounce back. Quire wants insects to feed the frogs. Teke wants to give them to Sock.”
“Outstanding,” Ben acknowledged. “Am I going to regret this?”
“Delegate, captain. Catching bugs and frogs is Quire’s problem. I must say, I look forward to hearing them sing. The trees do an amazing job to counter environmental stress. Nature sounds would add so much more, and living creatures.”
“Alright. And Judge? Do we believe his physical damage was all caused by a fuel explosion, not the micro warp?”
Eli paused longer than Ben would have liked. “It’s hard to say. Cryo stress. I didn’t have baseline readings on him. The Yang-Yang nanites had what, an hour or two to clean up damage at the cellular level. I can say with confidence that his damage was not beyond the Yang-Yang capacity to fix. But I believe there was damage repaired. Major damage. Not heat related.”
“But you didn’t get to see it,” Ben suggested.
“No. Sorry.”
“Very well. Impressed as always, Eli. Carry on.” Ben turned to leave.
“Hey, cap!” Judge complained. “What happens to me?”
“Undecided,” Ben informed him coldly.
He exited the med bay, to stand at the engineering podium. He pushed Judge out of mind as he updated the tech team. By now, Cope was on his way back to rendezvous, put-putting at a snail’s pace with the broken skiff in tow.
“Oh, ah, oui!” Elise cried out in delight as he finished the story. “She explains everything!”
Ben wryly wished ‘she’ would explain something, let alone everything. But now Pointreau and Teke were jabbering away in hard-core materials jargon. He cut their foreplay out of the channel.
“Cope, we could correct and repeat the test.”
“I was just thinking that. Use the shuttle this time, though. The skiff might as well be origami. But there’s not enough time before Lavelle and Gorky reach us.”
“We have propulsion again,” Ben reminded him. “But do we still have viable equipment?”
90
“He looks great!” Ben cried, as his newly-young dad appeared on the screen. He paused the video at the start to study the no longer familiar face. Dad could pass as his brother now. He hadn’t realized before quite how much he resembled his father.
“Do you mind?” Cope prompted. The three dads congregated in Ben’s office the next morning. Ben sat in his chair, while his co-parents perched on the display desk to either corner. Nathan Acosta’s video arrived some time during the crisis technical marathon. Once everything was under control, they slept for over 12 hours. The engineer was anxious to finally hear about his kids.
Ben might have preferred breakfast first. He pressed the Go button.
“Son! And other sons!” Nathan boomed. “It was good to finally hear about… No, it wasn’t. What were you thinking, Benjamin? Assault on Sagamore Orbital?” He raised a stern finger. “We’ll get back to that, young man!”
Ben laughed. “Notice how it’s always my fault.” The old man’s mannerisms on a young guy looked ludicrous.
“Sh,” Cope suppressed him.
“First. As Jules told you, we left the mansion.” He visibly considered how to approach this topic. “Cope, I am very proud of young Socrates. That’s the main thing. He decided he wanted to attend creche in Mahina Actual. But he didn’t want to be separated from Nico and Frazz. And he asked me to help.”
“He never goes straight to a point, does he,” Teke mused.
Nathan continued, “So we appealed to your friend Atlas Pratt in the city. Long story. But turns out, Mahina Actual is willing to honor your tuition already paid to the creche in Schuyler. They can steal the money by book-keeping, I guess –”
“What?” Cope bit out.
> “They don’t actually charge money for high school here. Here, meaning we did another swap. Teke had his apartment here at the University – I hope you don’t mind, Teke. Atlas is only in the city a few days a month for meetings, so he’ll stay in your home. And the children are absolutely in love with Atlas’s place by the municipal zoo. You know. It used to be Clay Rocha’s place.”
“Oh wow,” Ben breathed. Clay had one of the most beautiful townhouses in Mahina Actual. Clay was a decade older than God, and a man of exquisite taste. The living room floor was a grassy sward to lure goats and bunnies and kittens in from the petting zoo. The master bath included a grotto of waterfall over striated red stone, behind a jungle spray of ferns separating it from the huge bed.
“I took the guest room, of course,” Nathan said. No dripping, Ben suspected. The kids would traipse in all the time to play with the waterfall. “Nico has the master bedroom, and Socrates and Sassafras when they stay the night. Which is Wednesday night, plus Saturday night through Glow. Just like you do at home, Cope.”
“No,” Cope moaned, knuckles white where he gripped the desk.
“Now, Cope,” Nathan remonstrated. “It was not easy to persuade Nico to come with us. He had friends in high school. He had a good programming job, and that cute little apartment. Also a girl, I think. Maybe a boy. Is he –? Never mind! None of my business until he tells me himself. The point is, I made a commitment. He and I will stay remain here at least through graduation –”
“Like hell you will!” Cope growled.
“And Sock, of course. Though after Teke returns to the city, maybe I won’t stay until Sock graduates. He’s delighted with his new classmates. He’s in the bright and gifted creche, separate from Frazz. He’s not ‘weird’ anymore for taking advanced math. His creche-mates are in the same boat. No bullies. He’s really coming out of his shell. I feel like I’m beginning to know him. Bright, funny, insightful, very kind.