Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  Sass looked to Darren, who replied slowly. “Make it a week instead of a couple months. Defenses are fine. But I’d rather not give them time to build offense. People are funny.”

  “They are that.” And not in a good way, Sass allowed. This decision was up to her as captain, but they had a point. “So damn, we’re here, and headed straight for them. But we know nothing, and go back to sleep.”

  Darren held up the reboot manual again and squinted an eye at her. “We can’t talk to them yet anyway.”

  “Radio waves have the same problem?”

  “Radio is a non-starter. Signal strength falls off as the square of distance. But even a laser tight-beam would scatter as wide as Pono’s rings at this distance.”

  “Virtue of necessity, then,” Sass concluded. “Alright. We party tonight and head back to sleep. Maybe do some chores first. I sure hope we didn’t break the warp drive.”

  Markley scratched his nose. “About that. The warp no longer passes its self-test. But not to worry. Still four years before we need to warp again. We’ll figure something out.”

  Sass gazed at him in horror as this bombshell sunk in. “When did you test this?”

  “As soon as we got the power conduits out of range. I didn’t want to say anything in public. Cause panic among the crew.”

  “May I panic?” Clay quipped.

  “Feel free,” Darren invited. “But we’re headed for the right place. Sanctuary is where the warp drive came from. Maybe they have expertise. Or a spare.”

  They’d better. Otherwise Thrive was stranded in this system. With the warp drive, the trip home was a mere 12 objective years from here, or 4 years subjective with a one year stopover.

  Without warp, Thrive could never reach home.

  Sass dropped her forehead onto her fingertips to massage the headache forming behind her brow. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for now.”

  97

  “And that’s where we stand.” Sass beamed a professional smile at her assembled crew over dinner that evening. She omitted the fact their warp drive no longer showed signs of life, instead dwelling on the impossibility of learning about their destination at this juncture. Stay tuned!

  “Everyone’s free to catch another sixteen months or so of beauty rest. Questions?” Sass sat back and sipped her wine. She wasn’t sure what Darren might have told Dot. So she had three pairs of eyes to avoid. Which probably made her look shifty.

  She dug into her supper.

  The meal was excellent. Thrive’s fruit and vegetables, and pure water, tasted better than any she’d ever bought on Mahina. During the Denali jaunt, every crop regimen was honed to flavorful perfection. But for this special milestone, the housekeeper Corky Graham pulled out all the stops, roasting a couple frozen chickens with all the fixings. She made fresh bread from real wheat flour instead of recycled soy protein.

  “Why can’t we see the planet better?” Corky boomed. Sass once asked their medic Dot if she was hard of hearing. But no, she was just loud.

  “Darren?” Sass invited.

  Markley busily fussed at making himself replacement eyeglasses at the supper table. The electronics of his previous pair were fried by their electrocution. He had flawless vision – their health nanites made sure of that. The glasses provided eye protection and a convenient heads-up reference display while he worked on machinery.

  “It’s an ill-conditioned problem. Mathematically.” Darren followed up with a forkful of salad.

  Sass swallowed, and translated. “The planet’s tilted the wrong way.”

  “So you build a better telescope?” the housekeeper demanded.

  “It’s the angle,” Sass attempted.

  Clay rose and pointed out the colony on the planet’s image, currently gracing the wall display. “No matter what we do, it’s fuzzy because we’re looking at it sideways.”

  “May I help fine-tune?” Remi Roy offered in a strong French accent. Third officer and second engineer, Remi was from Sagamore, their sole non-Mahinan.

  “No, thanks.” Darren didn’t bother to raise his eyes from his meticulous craft project.

  “Or I could skip cryo and keep the lovely Sass company,” Remi offered with smarmy smile and a wink.

  Sass winked both eyes. “Dot has come light years – literally – on the cold sleep nanites.”

  “Oh, yes! Gross tissue damage reduced by half from the drugs we used on you when we left Mahina. Zero fatalities. Prior cryo regimes carried a ten to twenty percent mortality rate. Sperm motility is still quite low upon resuscitation, along with erectile dysfunction, and drippy sinuses.”

  “Perhaps my English is not…” Remi mused. “Did you say –?”

  “Dot’s cryo nanites have side effects,” Sass translated, “on organs that secrete liquids. Eyes, nose, et cetera.”

  “Yes, that,” Dot agreed.

  Remi stared at the nurse uneasily. Sass couldn’t blame him. She too found the eager glow in Dot’s eye disconcerting.

  Sass breezed on, “Who else wants to stay awake with me?”

  For this momentous midpoint of their journey to Sanctuary, the celebration was lackluster. Bored as she felt while they were in cryo, Sass almost felt lonelier with the crew awake.

  The captain glanced up from her desk at Remi Roy’s knock on her door, and waved him to a seat. So far the third officer had spent most of his time in cryo. Though first he had to build the cold sleep facilities.

  Remi was 41, but looked closer to 60 when he joined Thrive and gained a full set of Yang-Yang nanites. He served half his life aboard the asteroid mining platforms of Hell’s Bells. His rejuvenation progress arrested by cryo, his cheeks still sagged around lines bracketing his mouth, and beneath his broad jawline. His graying hair showed rich brown roots.

  “Mon capitan! Please! You have something for me?” He winked with a crooked slimy smile.

  Sass pursed her lips repressively.

  Remi frowned. “Why this? Every time I smile at you, I feel you wish to lock me in the fridge.”

  “Let’s get back to that,” Sass deflected. “I’d like you to double-check my engine burn calculations. For course corrections and deceleration into Sanctuary.” She swiped the desk display clear, then brought up the navigation programs, blank of inputs. “From scratch.”

  “From…?”

  “Start over. I want to see how you calculate it. Then we’ll compare yours and mine.”

  “Ah!” He stretched his neck, flipped the desk display right-side-up relative to him, and leaned on his forearms to glower at the problem. “Our original plan? Or do I calculate that again, too? Is this a test?”

  “No, sorry.” She opened the original flight plan. “Ask for anything you want, when you want it. But I don’t want to prejudice you.”

  Mouth slightly parted and one eyebrow cocked, Remi’s reaction to this was clearly, Screw you, too. “I need our current position, bearing, and deviation from the plan. But I retrieve them myself.”

  He worked a full two minutes before venting. “You know, Sass, I am a capable engineer. Experienced in space, in this hull. Thrive is not my first PO-3!”

  “I know you are. I appreciate your skills.”

  “No, you do not. I smile at you, and you scowl, and put me on ice. No! Say nothing! I am calculating now! Bitch.”

  He completed a problem sketch. He itemized the task, then filled the first screen full of inputs into the navigation problem.

  Then he just had to unload again. “What is your problem with me? Why can I not be useful? Of course Darren becomes more experienced. Because I spend my days as a corpsicle while he learns remedial space handling, yes? No! We cannot talk now! I have calculations to perform!”

  Sass allowed, “We should talk…”

  “So you can cut me down again? I think not.”

  Sass watched as he worked, finally engaged in his navigation. She was impressed. He remembered to compensate for the gravitational effects of sun and extraneous planets much sooner than she h
ad.

  And when he arrived at the answer sheet of burns, he surprised her by continuing on without pause. “What are you doing now?” she asked.

  “Optimization. I run the first-pass solution through a variation generator. Equivalent ballistics. Then I ask the computer to calculate time and fuel cost for each.” He stabbed the desk a few times with his finger. “Constraints, max fuel expenditure, max speed. Priority time over fuel.” With a final flourish tap, he sat back in his chair. “She thinks about this.”

  “She?”

  “The computer, she speaks with a woman’s voice.” He said this so sadly that Sass was taken aback. “Now we talk. Why do you hate me?”

  Because every conversation goes weird on me. “Remi, does it bother you that the ship sounds female?” Sass feared he didn’t like women.

  “It is sad on Hell’s Bells, of course. We have no women. A few came just before I leave for your ship. But since I leave Sagamore, only the computer’s voice.”

  Sass winced both eyes shut. “You have no experience with women!”

  “I am no virgin! I was 19 when I leave home!”

  Sagamore exiled him for subversion. Sass didn’t hold this against him. Any Saggy worth knowing objected to the slavers who ruled the other moon of Pono. Sass spent 20 years under farm arrest herself for the Mahina version of crimes against the urb overlords. “Did you leave a girlfriend behind on Sagamore?”

  “Not really. She turned me in.”

  Sass nodded. “Wink at me like you did when you came in.” He performed as ordered. “Yeah, that expression. Never do that to a woman again. It’s…” Repulsive? Reptilian? Makes him look like a frog? “Mahina body language is different. You smile like that to a prostitute. Not a woman you respect.”

  His eyebrows flew high. “Oh.” He leaned forward to touch her hand. “Anything else?”

  She rapped his hand sharply. “That’s an intimate touch. For a lover, not your boss.”

  He sat back aghast. “All this time, you don’t tell me this? The other girls don’t tell me this?”

  “There are no ‘girls’ on this ship, Remi. The women are older than you.”

  “Hah! You don’t look older!”

  “I’m 104 subjective. I was born on Earth in 2090.”

  This dramatic statement lost its impact to the need to translate it into Sagamore years. Bottom line, Sass was born 120 years ago on a now-legendary planet. But 16 of those years vanished instantaneously in two warp jumps.

  “Huh. Oh!” The computer interrupted with a slew of solutions. Remi instructed the desk to plot them on time versus fuel axes. He zoomed in to study a few in detail, then sighed. He saved his work, then made a copy to start over. “Mistake. We don’t correct our current location first, this is foolish.”

  Sass leaned forward. “Oh… You’re right. I made the same mistake.”

  He nodded, set up his problem again, then restarted his optimization sequence. Apparently the ship AI learned some tricks along the way, because the second batch completed in seconds.

  Sass rounded the table to study the solutions by his side. “Damn, you’re good.”

  “I try,” he returned with a boyish smile. “This one has six burns per day sometimes. She saves 17 days from the original plan.”

  “I love it. Your solution is way better than mine.”

  “We save mine, then you recalculate to double-check.” He suited action to words and cleared the desk for her to try again.

  “Right.” Sass started over based on his refinements. Their solutions didn’t diverge by much, but his optimization saved 12 days over hers – a mere 523 days on top of the 540 traveled so far.

  “Well done, Remi. Thank you very much.”

  “It is nothing,” he demurred. “May I stay out of the freezer if I treat you like a man?”

  Sass’s heart sank. Had she really made him feel that unwelcome? “Cold sleep is optional, Remi. Only to skip the boring months. But you do understand that there can be nothing…physical…between us? Clay is my partner, and I am the captain. I’m off limits.”

  “Yes, I understand this, of course!” he cried in frustration, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “You will teach me, yes? Today, you tell me what I do to annoy you. Continue, please.”

  “Of course,” Sass agreed. “I apologize. I should have understood sooner.”

  He waved the apology away. “I want this mission to succeed. You scare me with the electrocution. This is terrible. We could have lost the warp drive! Be stuck here forever! I must check Darren’s work. Like I check your navigation. A second opinion for a critical calculation, yes?”

  Only a cad would stand by her lie at this point. “Remi… The warp drive fails its self-test. It may be damaged.”

  “Incroyable!” His voice squeaked up on a hysterical note as his arms flew wide.

  Sass summoned her dignity. “Speak to Darren. Quietly. In private. Maybe calm down first.”

  “You Mahinans! Repressed and pompous fools!”

  He stormed out of her office, bouncing against the doorway.

  Perhaps she should have checked with Clay and Darren first. But she had an excellent excuse. No, not an excuse. I made a decision. Because she agreed with Remi. She needed a second opinion on critical problems. She consigned Darren to his fate.

  98

  “You promise me!” Remi demanded of Sass yet again, wagging his finger within inches of her nose. These past couple weeks out of hibernation he’d made great strides. He behaved like a longshoreman instead of a lech. “You do not wake him without me!”

  “Give it a rest, Roy!” Markley grumbled, his mild-mannered Clark Kent routine frayed by the third officer’s abuse.

  Sass hunched with the two engineers, Markley’s wife Dot, and Clay on the access balcony in front of cold storage. The morgue-like shelves ran 2.5 meters deep. At the outset of this voyage, Remi installed a good floor over the crew quarters at the rear of the hold. Before he built the cryo facility, only air ducts roamed up here. The space wasn’t quite tall enough to stand straight. He and the crew did a nice job on the lights, subdued and soothing.

  They’d already tucked the rest of the crew away for another year and a half, or until needed.

  Dot glowered at the engineers, one her beloved husband of 50 years. “Darren. You first. Remi, you lie down, too.” She stood between two drawers, drawn out for easy access at chest height. She filled an enormous stainless steel syringe with her drug-and-nanite cocktail, the liquid like quicksilver.

  The injection looked all too much like the one forced on Sass when she was 33. Refugee cop Sassafras Collier died that day, replaced with her current undying self. She was a form of AI instead of a real person, a program running on nanites and neurons. She hadn’t known that part until her trip to Denali. Ignorance wasn’t bliss, but knowledge wasn’t reassuring, either. The needle gave her wicked flashbacks.

  But as captain she wouldn’t use cold sleep herself.

  Darren stripped his clothes and devices, including his grav generator, down to his skivvies, and laid it all in a carton. He hopped onto his slab and lay flat before Remi finished stowing his gear. His head stuck outward as though slipping his feet into a sleeping bag. Clay lent a hand pulling the thick insulating blanket up to nestle around his neck, and applied the protective gel to his face, redolent with camphor and menthol.

  Next came the worst step, in Sass’s estimation. The patient’s eyes got slathered in goop. A sleep mask went over that, mostly to remind the patient to keep their eyes closed. The nose wasn’t so bad, with oxygen cannula. Clay retreated to let Dot attach the electrodes and life sign sensors.

  Remi was ready for Sass to perform the ablutions on him. The captain blanched a moment at the intimacy, but scolded herself. This was a scary moment of abject trust on Remi’s part.

  “I’ll be here when you wake,” she promised. She tenderly spread the ointment to form an even slobber across his face. Then she paused to gaze into his eyes.

  “
I’m sorry I get mad sometimes,” he blurted. “I just…”

  She nodded in sympathy, and murmured, “Close your eyes when you’re ready. No rush. And Remi, thank you for your hard work.”

  He’d been right, of course. Darren missed a glitch in one of the power conduits, a contributing cause to the electrocution. The fault was subtle, and took them days to track, trading insults half the time. He’d also led a team to fill the fuel hoppers for her, and mucked out the recycling system. “You’re a talented engineer, and a fine officer.”

  His eyelids crumpled, and he swallowed. At last he nodded and closed his eyes to be slimed shut. Sass performed the rites, then gently nestled the mask and air supply onto his face. Dot was still busy affixing sensors to her husband.

  “You still have a few minutes before the injection,” Sass encouraged, casting around for something upbeat to discuss. “Do children count sheep to sleep on Sagamore?”

  “Meat animal?” he guessed. Sagamore’s core livestock was tilapia swimming in the rice paddies. “I don’t know Earth creatures.”

  “Never mind. Do children pray before bed? When I was a child, it went, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’” She stopped when she remembered the scary next lines.

  But Remi recited an equivalent prayer in French. “My mother said it with me and my sisters. They are married with children. Whether they like it or not. Ah, no. Now their children have children.”

  “Throw a prayer their way, too,” Sass suggested. She squeezed his shoulder and yielded her place for Dot to work. “Sleep safe, Remi.”

  Clay drew out another two shelves, and she stopped dead. Two? He’d threatened to try cold sleep. But she hadn’t believed him!

  She squat-marched to her partner. “Really, Clay? You’re going to leave me all alone?”

  “You’ve been alone before,” Clay returned coldly. “The last seven years at your farm, wasn’t it?”

  “My parole officer called every other day, and visited once a week,” Sass hissed back. “Solitary confinement is cruel punishment.”