by Ginger Booth
“Not now, Teke,” Cope quelled him. “How’s it feel, Ben?”
“Strange,” Ben reported. “Like there’s a sensation I can detect, but my mind hasn’t learned to interpret it yet. Detached and humming somehow, combination of hearing and touch. There, now I can feel the vibration. And see the lights. Wow.”
“The warp field is way compacted,” Teke reported. “Focused, sharper, barely a kilometer across this time.”
“Ben?” Cope prompted after half a minute.
“Yeah, sorry,” Ben murmured. “It’s just so beautiful. I get what Judge meant. Heaven split open to beckon him.” The fractal arcs and bubbles and fronds moved slowly, continually evolving a new expression of the same complex thought. The shuttle pointed away from Prosper, 10 km behind him, and Pono loomed behind that. Nothing stood in front of Ben but the swooping warp lights and distant stars.
“Field stable, Ben,” Cope urged softly. “Ready for jump.”
Ben lifted his hand in slow motion, rested a finger on the button, then lifted his eyes into the light again, unwilling to miss a drop of its glory. “Initiating jump in 3, 2, 1, now.”
92
No time elapsed, yet Ben retained a fleeting impression of the whole light show inverting itself inside out before immediately blinking out. Nothing remained in front of him but stars.
“What happened?” he asked. He assumed the warp generator simply punked out on him. Then the dead reckoner completed its star sightings and calculations and updated his location and travel distance, a little slow on the uptake. He laughed out loud. “WOOT! I did it, five thousand kilometers!”
But then he started to feel woozy. His stomach churned. Eli said something about vitals dropping. Ben coughed, then coughed again. The second time blood sprayed across the helmet and his pretty view. That was a shame. “Cope?”
“Just hang in there, buddy.” Cope’s voice, a lifeline.
Ben tried to answer, but his lungs didn’t seem to supply air to produce words.
Then abruptly he felt much better, really great in fact. He lifted out of his body, and floated toward the overhead, unencumbered by any sloshing bulky p-suit. Somehow he was over Cope’s head as well. His lover looked so sad. Ben floated closer to touch him, reassure him that everything was wonderful.
Then suddenly he yanked back into his body as it spasmed. The world reeked of coppery blood and digestive juices, all turned crimson. His rigid limbs arced and seized once, twice, then collapsed, flaccid. Ben worried the inside of his cheek with his tongue. He must have chomped it with his molars somewhere along the way.
But he breathed again, in gasps, his heart pounding fast and hard. “Ow,” he said distinctly. This time his vocal chords worked.
“Ben!” Cope pounced. “You’re conscious? Ben, what are the names of your children?”
“Nico, Frazz, Sock,” he replied, slow and muzzily. “Cope?”
“I’m not one of the kids, buddy,” he quipped. “Stay with us. Your jump was beautiful, perfect. Then your stomach hemorrhaged and your heart stopped. The med patch kicked in and rebooted your heart. That caused a seizure. But this is nothing your Yang-Yangs can’t fix. We’re coming to get you –”
“No you’re not,” Ben enunciated. “Stand by. Pressurizing cabin.” He belatedly remembered that he should have checked hull integrity first. But he didn’t bother to look now because – yes, the cabin was pressurizing nicely. And it was a pain to look at anything. Red gore dripped down his helmet. He had to duck his head down and peer through his eyebrows to find a clear spot, and that made him woozy.
Cope: “Buddy, explain, please.”
Kassidy: “He wants to wipe the blood out of his helmet.”
Eli: “He’s probably still dizzy. But blood oxidization is rising.”
Cope: “Careful, buddy.”
Ben took off the helmet, which mercifully shut up the chorus. In slow motion – oh, yeah, freefall. He snagged the bloody helmet before it drifted away. He returned to what he was doing, searching for some way to clean his helmet. Good, he found a grease rag in one of his suit cargo pockets. His suit provided a sipping straw. He took a mouthful, swished out the blood, and spat into his helmet. A pink globule tried to escape, but he nabbed it with his rag.
There was something dangerous about that. He couldn’t recall what. He mopped out the yucky helmet as best he could. When he determined that the bloody rag wouldn’t do any further good, he sealed it back into its pocket. He felt around, but couldn’t find another one. And besides, his thinking was starting to clear.
He had to reach into the yucky helmet and press a button to enable comms again. “Cope, is ammonia safe to clean this? Or alcohol?”
“A helmet? Sure. Either.”
“It won’t explode?” Ben clarified.
“What happened to Judge, you mean? Can’t happen. Do you smell fuel?”
“I smell blood and bile with a fruity tang of vinegar and sweaty socks,” Ben reported. “Eli, you’re figuring out what happened to me, right?”
“Working on that, captain,” Eli agreed.
“Kassidy, am I going to run out of Yang-Yangs?”
“You lose some, yeah. You have more than enough, though.”
“I’m jumping to Denali. Then back. I still have enough?”
“Ben!” Cope barked.
“Chief!” Ben scolded him coldly. “I was addressing Kassidy.”
“Checking your current nanite profile… You could survive over ten episodes like you just did, Ben,” Kassidy reported. “Med pack levels look good too. That’s assuming the damage doesn’t scale with distance.”
“It won’t,” Teke insisted.
“Good, keep working the problem. Captain out.” He turned off his helmet and unstrapped. His stomach objected to the free-fall thing, so he kicked in his personal grav generator for an easy 1/6th g, Mahina normal.
Feeling only slightly faint by now, he stepped back to the storage panel to rummage. Gotcha! He kept disposable alcohol wipes in here. The main display screens were absolutely irresistible to children and tourists. The captain hated the way they deposited greasy fingerprints on his view. He found a spongy reusable fiber wipe, too. Soon he’d restored his helmet to squeaky clean, and made a dent on the disgusting fluids that had dribbled to his collarbone. He used the sipper-spit-and-towel ploy to tidy up his appearance. He shuddered to think Frazzie and Sock might see him at a moment of glory, coated in vomit and gore. Nico might enjoy it.
He recalled that he’d tuned everyone out, and commed Kassidy one-on-one to consult on further grooming his face and hair.
She laughed out loud. “You are so gay!”
“I am not! I don’t want to terrify my kids!”
“No, you’re right. I’m sorry,” she repented, still chuckling. He tidied into the camera. She served as his verbal mirror until she proclaimed him restored to handsome. “Any woman would take one look at you and say, ‘too bad he’s gay.’”
Bitch. Ben had to concede he’d heard that one too many times. Rangy and forever clanking with tools, Cope never had to put up with this abuse. People were surprised Cope had a husband. Ben, not so much. I am not a frill!
But by now he felt fine, only a little tired. Much refreshed, he tuned in to his full chorus of technical advisors again. “Ben here. Figured anything out yet?”
They had ideas. Ben sealed himself in and depressurized again. He brought all systems back up to the warp field step for tuning. Teke’s new settings did feel a little better. Somehow a little more swooshy, another diagnostic he wouldn’t care to share with Cope. One new setting made his hair rise a little. He adjusted that one until it went almost to hair-raising but didn’t cross the line. The he took the swoosh control and eased it back just a hair.
And sudden stillness. The almost subliminal vibration cut out completely. “Wow, that feels good. Rock steady. Teke? Eli?”
“That’s exactly what we were trying to do,” Teke confessed.
“Perfect,” Elise pu
rred.
Eli wasn’t willing to commit. “Can we take it back to cold and bring it up again on these latest settings, Ben? I want to monitor you at baseline, and then coming up.”
Engineering wasn’t a spectator sport, Ben reflected. They brought the experiment down to cold state, then he rested his eyes for ten minutes. He listened to a recording of peeper frogs and the loudmouth insects they liked to eat, while his brain trust conferred. Then they brought the warp field back up and –
The light show held stationary, perfectly still, and down to only a few hundred meters across. Still fractal, any part he looked at closely resembled the whole. Now he discerned still more colors within, tiny streaks of reds and yellows embedded among the dominant greens and blues and purples.
“Good to go,” he said, right over someone else speaking. “Shall I?”
“Hold for one, Ben,” Cope murmured, and cut him out of the channel.
Ben overrode his choice and listened in on their arguments, until he heard the one thing he wanted. “Eli, repeat,” he broke in. “My vitals are back at nominal. Correct?”
“Correct, sar.”
“I’m not changing the settings again, people. We are go. Report when you are ready to observe. I have Denali local space coordinates queued to execute.”
They all checked and chimed their readiness Teke interrupted Kassidy and put things on hold. He’d belatedly thought to put Sora on standby on Denali for real-time feedback when Ben arrived. Getting her into position took a few minutes.
Then they took it from the top again, ending with Cope. “I love you. Good to go.”
“Initiating jump in 3-2-1-now.”
The fractal did not invert to his senses this time, like a sock turning inside out. It simply vanished. “Arrived. Awaiting position update.” Then he recalled that no one was listening to him. If he was where he thought he was, he left the shuttle’s meager comms range far behind. He reached to begin searching for the nearest relay satellite.
But first his hand passed over attitude control. Why not? He rotated the shuttle to check his view, and the crescent planet Denali loomed before him. Moving. Shit. He’d translated to it in space, at the right radius for a high geosynchronous orbit, more or less. The shuttle was at the wrong velocity to assume that orbit, though. His fingers flew on the flight calculator. Too slow. Can I…? Not that kind of acceleration, no… Shit!
The trip odometer flashed to confirm more precisely what he already knew. But it reminded him his beloved was risking heart failure at the moment. He needed to find that satellite. Gotcha.
“Scholar Sora! Are you there?” He bounced this broadcast to Mahina as well as Sora down on the surface. But the light speed time lag was nearly 10 minutes now. He prayed Sora could spare Cope the wait.
“I’m here, Ben! Welcome to Denali!” Sora replied. The half-second signal lag was barely noticeable, through Denali surface lines, up to high geosynchronous orbit and out to Ben. “I have Copeland on the other line. Say hello, Copeland!”
“Hey buddy, how ya feeling?” Cope’s voice sounded only slightly underwater from Sora’s microphone held in front of her moose-bot.
“I feel fine. My diagnostics agree,” Ben assured him. He kept a nervous eye on the growing planet. “And I love you. And Dad, and Nico and Frazzie and Sock. And our collaborators Teke and Elise, and my whole crew back on Prosper. A ton of data will start inundating you real soon now, I promise. As soon as I get off this comm. Did I say I love you?”
“Say that all you want,” Cope assured him. “Love you, too. I am so proud of you right now, buddy.”
“Congratulations to all of you for an amazing achievement!” Sora praised. “Now! How can I help?”
“You already did. Thank you, Sora!” Ben assured her. “Please hold this line open for real-time comms with my team. Cope, I’m coming back hot.”
“What?!”
93
Ben didn’t have time to soothe Cope’s worries right now. “Teke, you listening?” he asked over the moose-bot real-time link via Sora on the planet Denali. When Teke acknowledged, Ben reported his arrival coordinates and the crucial heading and velocity errors.
“Shit, Ben –” Teke began.
“What I need from you,” Ben spoke right over him, “is micro warp settings to return to Pono like right freaking now. Take the observed error bars into account. I will calculate in parallel. Let’s see if we match.”
Cope grieved, “Ben, you need a break.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not gonna get it. Sorry, buddy. Busy. Next voice I want to hear is Teke with those settings.”
He had other calculations he needed first. No, a stable orbit wasn’t attainable. He’d appreciate not going splat too quickly, though. And these chats with the folks back home took time. The shuttle didn’t have the luxury of a navigation AI on board, either. His first attempted solution was less than impressive, but better than nothing. Or was it? No, he’d burn through the fuel he had left. Damn.
Oh, yeah, the data. He packed that off through the satellite, then turned back to his calculations. He still needed a solution for the hop back to Pono, too. Stop that. Just the one thing now. Slow his descent.
Slow my descent by how much? That was the important calculation, he realized. If he did nothing, burned nothing, he had… “Teke. Be advised, I need to warp out before 28 minutes. At that point I will be at…” He reeled off the projected altitude and velocity if he did nothing. “Unless I do something to brake.”
“Do you have fuel and power to brake?” Teke inquired.
“Not enough, no. Compromise is possible. I could stall.”
Teke had far better computers on hand than Ben did, including the one between his ears. “Advise warp out in 20 minutes, on my mark…now.”
“Timer set,” Ben agreed. “Warp warmup sequence to commence in seventeen minutes from mark…now.”
“Marks synchronized,” Teke acknowledged. “Still working on that other problem.”
“Do you advise braking?” Ben reminded him.
“I do not,” Teke confirmed. “I’d have to start all over with the calculations. We don’t have time.”
“Understood. Awaiting coordinates.” Ben set yet another timer to give himself a two-minute warning before he needed to initiate the sequence.
He started to unstrap for another set of exercises, then paused. Teke was light years ahead of him on calculating settings for the micro warp. But that was not true of Pono orbital options. Ben cleared the piloting computer again and considered his errors coming into Denali. He factored in the vast gravitational hazard of the gas giant and the navigational reef of the rings. If he re-entered off by thus much, and only had so much thrust available, where he’d prefer to arrive was not where Prosper sat, but rather…
“Teke, I have my suggested coordinates for Pono insertion,” he announced. He supplied his suggested parameters. They weren’t input to the micro warp – they had no program rigged yet to perform those calculations, evolved only hours ago. Or was it minutes?
“Captain,” Teke returned, his tone aggrieved. “I was bringing you back to Prosper.”
“Counter-indicated,” Ben replied. “My safest bet is at Hell’s Bells radius. I’d aim farther above the rings, but then I’d run out of air and fuel before rendezvous.”
“Calculating both,” Teke acknowledged. “Hold for one.”
Ben reflected they didn’t have many ‘ones’ left. Six minutes in fact. He checked and confirmed all the jump data had transmitted. He wrapped up another bundle of his less interesting data since then, and sent that on its way.
“Eli, Ben,” the botanist cut in. “Now receiving medical data. You are good to go. That last round of drive adjustments worked a treat.”
“Thanks, Eli.” Ben took a deep breath, and blew it out slowly. “Teke. I need settings now.”
After a few seconds, the physicist finally got back to him. “Damn, you’re good, Ben. That works. I can confirm your suggested destination. Re
ady?”
“Ready.” He keyed in the jump parameters to yield those coordinates, as Teke read them off. He repeated them back to confirm.
“We’re contacting Lavelle –” Teke attempted to continue.
“Don’t!” Ben cut him off. “My job, later. Initiating warmup sequence.” He had almost a minute left on his timer, but the drive warmup stage he could get out the way early. “Coming up fine.”
“Awaiting instructions, captain,” Cope murmured.
“Thanks, Cope,” Ben returned, grateful for his thoughtful reassurance, devoid of demands. “Warmup complete, all systems nominal. Initiating the warp drive.” The awe-inspiring fractal flower bloomed before him, steady and assured. He hoped it wasn’t a gateway to Heaven this time, either, as he rested his finger thoughtfully on the jump button. “All systems look good. Will jump on timer mark. You did a fantastic job building this machine, Cope. And – go.”
The warp fractal blinked out, and he was in Pono orbit. The yellow striped monster loomed where he expected, more or less. The rings were a touch farther below him than he would have liked, but might be close enough. He’d spent his entire adult life in the rings. He could tell that much by eye.
Speed check! Close enough! Ben didn’t need to calculate that one. He knew damned well what orbital velocity he needed to stay out of Pono’s maw.
In vast relief, he blew out and dropped forward, to thunk his helmet onto the edge of the console. He allowed himself several seconds of luxurious ease. Then he got busy. Prosper was out of comms range. So was everyone else. Space was damned big. Shuttles were not meant to wander off on their own.
The dead reckoner finally reported in. Sweet! He was more-or-less halfway between Mahina and Sagamore, closest to Hell’s Bells. All three were within 15 degrees of ring arc at the moment, Hell’s Bells leading the pack, Prosper trailing. Somewhere within the same volume of space must lay Lavelle’s Gossamer and Gorky’s Heavenly Bodies. They had no reason to be anywhere else.