by Ginger Booth
“See here!” Tharsis interrupted. “Silva, I’m the ruling mayor! Captain Collier, you have made your point! There is no need for a further demonstration!”
“Really? Who shot at me?” Sass inquired sweetly. “Was that one of you?”
“Of course not!” Petunia Ling scoffed, offended. “We are a peaceful settlement! We have no weapons!”
“Ling, let me do the talking!” Tharsis shouted, to an impatient roll of the eyes from Ling. Silva appeared to be researching something. “Captain Collier, it is true that we have no guns that could reach you from the planet. And no one on the planet was aware of the ship – either ship – sent against you. When you complained of our ‘answering machine,’ I believe you spoke to our AI, Sanctuary Control –”
“Shiva,” Ling hissed.
“Shiva,” Tharsis agreed. “All of our asteroid belt facilities are under Shiva’s control. And down here as well, really. She’s in charge of resource extraction, manufacturing, life support, janitorial. Compared to the colonies in the Aloha system, we had very few people here. You understand the difficulty.”
The Ganny guy Hugo Silva cut in. “This is truly gratifying news for my people, that colonists survived in Aloha.” The Gannies built and crewed all three of the vast refugee ships to populate the worlds of Aloha. “We never heard back from you. May I ask, which colony world made it?”
Sass’s brow furrowed. Which? “All three colony worlds survive in Aloha. Plus a few space habitats. Most of my crew are from Mahina, with my third officer here from Sagamore. My first mate and I were born on Earth, but now call Mahina home.”
They boggled at that. Hugo Silva looked enlightened, the other two skeptical.
“Fifteen minutes, Sass,” Remi reminded her.
“Right. Back to the point, people.” Sass steepled her fingers, leaning elbows on her dashboard. “Who was responsible for firing at us?”
“Shiva,” they said simultaneously.
Hugo added, “She doesn’t consult anyone. Those ships are remote controlled by the AI. Space is dangerous. We made the ultimate sacrifice and now enjoy our leisure.”
Sass blinked, then asked carefully, “And who controls your AI?”
They each looked down sheepishly. Tharsis admitted, “We don’t know how to do that.”
“Sacré bleu,” Remi erupted. “You tell the AI that we are your citizens!”
“Wait, Remi.” Sass enabled the camera facing him, and echoed all their faces arrayed on the view screen before them, Thrive officers to the right in front of Remi. “People, my third officer, Remi Roy. Explain, Remi. Remember, not everyone can win an argument with an AI like you do.” She smiled at him.
He sniffed Gallic disdain. “Your AI exists to protect your colony. So tell this Shiva that Thrive and its crew are now part of your colony. Long-lost cousins, new immigrants, adopted heirs, whatever. Then it’s Shiva’s job to protect us, too. And this was all a frightful misunderstanding. Though I still want to fire at their island. It will be epic. And they only have five minutes left.”
“I think we can grant them a half hour extension,” Sass allowed. “Provided they use it to reprogram their rogue AI. And we will continue to discuss a happy reunion. Yes?” Her eyes leveled challenge at Tharsis, Ling, and Silva in turn.
“I’ll work on that,” Hugo Silva replied. His section of the screen blanked to a white-on-grey rendition of the Ganny Colony Corps logo, color-matched to his shirt.
“Extension granted,” Sass purred. “Remi, if you could update your timer.”
Sadly the engineer stabbed them a 30 minute reprieve.
“Assuming your AI is brought to heel,” Sass continued, “we would very much like to visit your colony. Colonies? And tell you about the Aloha experience since settlement. Compare notes. Trade databases. Learn of your technical advances and share ours. And on a more prosaic note, we need fuel and water to return to Aloha. Fresh food stocks would be nice. Would there be a convenient spot for us to park near your colony and visit?”
Her broken warp drive was a weakness. She wasn’t ready to admit weaknesses yet.
Deliberations turned a pleasant leaf after this. The locals had a little spaceport with refueling and tankage, for deliveries from their AI-controlled factories in the belt. Major Ling, the Loonie, seemed hesitant to let them park the ship so close by, but the Martian, Colonel Tharsis, kept his eye on the clock. He was eager to make the visitors feel right at home before that water shot deadline.
They shared a good laugh about the initial rock strike. The wayward ‘children’ turned out to be aged 27-38. They called home in panic the minute the fireworks began, all safe and accounted for, having been nowhere near the blast zone. Tharsis promised Remi they had terrific recordings of the event from the colony and a few other locations. Still, no one on the surface was eager to see a water blast, to the engineer’s disappointment.
Hugo Silva returned. “Mission success! Shiva accepts you all as Ganny colonists! You’ll be chipped when you arrive.”
“Chipped?” Sass inquired.
“All colonists have implanted ID chips. So Shiva can keep an eye on us,” Hugo explained, then looked a little vague.
“Then why didn’t you know where your joyriders were?” Sass inquired. Clay rapped on her shoulder blade from behind, probably to suggest she back off. They were getting along so nicely. Don’t blow it.
“We made the ultimate sacrifice and now enjoy our leisure,” Hugo replied, still abstracted. Then he blinked and shrugged out of his little…fit.
“So I’ve heard,” Sass acknowledged, and rapped her dashboard. “Quite a lot of excitement here today. We are agreed? Thrive will land at your spaceport the day after tomorrow.”
“Two days after tomorrow,” Remi corrected her. “Sanctuary has 17-hour days.”
“Oh, we use 24-hour days,” Hugo assured them. “Humans can’t adjust to 17-hour days. It was impossible. We use an Earth clock.” He replaced half of his slot on the screen with a clock for Remi, who quickly got a synchronized local timepiece going, set to North American Central Standard Time, of all things.
Sass sighed relief. The Denali spring season used a local 20-hour clock, for an uncomfortable two-month bout of jet lag. In summer and winter, they used 24-hour days. In those seasons the sun was always up or always down.
They would land about 09:30 Houston time. Though Houston died before Sass was born.
“Oh, one more question,” she added. “Do you call yourselves Sanctuarians? Or…?”
“Three colonies,” Tharsis clarified. “Martian, Loonie, Ganny.”
“With only…how many people?” Sass asked. So I lied. More than one question. But they were her most basic questions. And she waited 18 months for answers.
“Currently 5,300-odd,” Tharsis supplied. “Over half Martian, about a quarter Loonie, and the rest Ganny.”
They were right. The colony had declined from its initial 8,000. “I see. Until we meet in person! Or feel free to contact me again. But we have significant repairs to complete.” Sass smiled and cut the channel.
“Chipped,” Clay murmured.
“Oxymoron,” Remi observed. “We made the ultimate sacrifice. If they make the ultimate sacrifice, they are dead, yes?”
“Yeah,” Sass said. “But they’re human. Aren’t they?”
“Sure, Sass,” Clay said. “Just like we are.”
Sass winced. She and her lover weren’t human, not really. They hadn’t elaborated on that with their new crew. “We have a crew to console. Let’s get to it. Remi, we meet back here for next burn in two hours. Do you need to rest?”
“I’m good. The nanites, they are very capable. So is that AI.”
109
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Sass intoned. “All hands, salute.”
She modeled a salute, standing at the head of the table to face the big screen in the galley. They only had the one body for the seven who died, the rest having either blown out into space or joined the ship’
s recycling stream in fragments.
She led some sad brainstorming at dinner last night. No one was willing to chop up Harry’s body to feed into a waste chute. Burial on Sanctuary wasn’t an option, because the locals recycled bodies. In the end, they made a coffin out of a variation on the recipe for recycled potting mix, and placed Harry in it.
The box was outside now. Clay and Joey still wore pressure suits from bearing it out and securing it to the grapplers. Now she had only to throw it into the planet’s gravity well, to burn up on entry into the atmosphere.
“Fire,” Sass intoned, though the grappler hurl bore more resemblance to a softball toss. A tactful choice of camera angle obscured that point. They saw a brief streak as the coffin sped away not quite perpendicular to their current backwards heading as they braked around Sanctuary for landing.
“At ease,” Sass ordered, with a sigh. Sniffles met this announcement, sincere ones of grief from Joey, plus the three sniveling science crew who were recuperating from Dot’s first generation cryo nanites. They were fresh from three straight years of cold sleep.
“Porter, Zelda, for today you’ll assist Darren and Remi in repairing crew quarters for you to live in.” She smiled briefly, confident that Porter, at least, would rather sleep in the hold rather than endure another night bunking with Husna Zales, the ranking scientist. My day to desperately mis Eli, Sass thought, recalling her beloved botanist, the mild-mannered rebel against Mahina Actual’s scientific hierarchy.
Though what Eli rebelled against was their research priorities. The contempt with which he treated grad students like Porter and Zelda was fairly standard.
“Ah, captain,” Porter attempted. “I have no skills –”
Remi nodded to confirm that assessment. But Markley, experienced adjunct faculty, pounced on him with zeal. “Porter, unless you do your own instrumentation, you will forever be at the mercy of the engineers.”
Porter and Zelda shared a glance and sniffle of commiseration, then shuffled off at the mercy of the engineers. Joey and Clay would join them after they racked their suits. Corky would help with an eye toward aesthetics and cleaning rather than structural repairs.
Which left Husna Zales to Sass. She caught the geologist on the catwalk before she could escape. “Dr. Zales, today –”
“Geology,” Husna interrupted. With thick waves of lustrous black hair, smoky dark eyes in a dusky complexion, and remarkably broad hips, Husna could have made a harem girl in some other century. Here and now she was a harridan in her mid-70’s, approaching the obsolescence date of her nanites. When the urb nanites expired at age 80, the host precipitously declined from an apparent 25 to a wrinkled death of old age in under 5 years.
“I left explicit instructions to be roused only when my specialty was required, not to be pointlessly terrorized by your space misadventures. You should have safely landed the ship and identified a problem of geology before disrupting my cryo, captain. I am quite annoyed, I assure you.”
Sass wrinkled her nose in a squinty smile. “Right back atcha, Husna! But geology is not the only skill of trained scientist. I need a computing consult.”
“Computing is not my –”
“You’ve argued with supercomputers all your life. Thing is, I seem to have an ultra-super-AI to deal with. That’s who fired on us.”
“And I am supposed to do what about this?” The arrogance blazed through Husna’s sultry young veneer.
“I want you to review all communications I’ve had with this – murderous thing. Research the Nanomage databases, too. And advise me on how to deal with her. It. Shiva.”
Husna crossed her arms. “Captain Collier, you clearly haven’t mastered even the rudiments of supervision. We are to land on the planet tomorrow. Whatever this AI is, all applicable expertise dwells on that planet. Hire someone who knows. Someone not me.”
“Very well,” Sass attempted. “Then join the repair crew.”
“No. That is a matter for simple mechanical ability. Which you can hire. On the planet. Tomorrow.”
“You have a lot of damned gall to speak to me like that!”
“You’ve watched too many old movies,” sniff. “If you’ll excuse me, captain, I will return to my stateroom and see what mineral survey I can complete with your wholly inadequate optics,” sniff. “Your hack of a chief engineer should have invested his time into better lenses. And you should have planned for at least twenty passes for an orbital survey before we set down. But I shall do my best.” With that, Dr. Husna Zales stalked off.
Sass truly, deeply, fervently hated the science faculty of Mahina Actual. This prima donna act was exactly what it took to succeed in that publish-or-perish pressure cooker. And yes, better optics would have been smart. And a multi-pass orbital survey, if anyone had thought of it, or been awake to ask for it.
Then again, Sanctuary wasn’t their planet. Sass assumed the locals had studied the problem. Asking them to share data was a lot simpler than local hiring, or allowing strangers to work on the ship. Sass hired some security. They were among the seven dead.
No matter how short-handed, maybe she should have kept Husna on ice.
She waited, leaning on the catwalk railing, as Clay and Joey finished setting their p-suits to recharge below. When they headed up to crew berthing, she crooked a finger to summon Clay. He gave Joey an encouraging clasp across the shoulders as they parted, and sent him ahead into the deconstruction zone.
He joined her at the railing. “What did you need?”
“You’re better at urb attitude than I am.”
“True.”
“Figure out how get some work out of Husna.”
“I discussed that with her before the funeral,” Clay explained. “She’s doing an orbital survey of the planet’s geology. After landing, we’ll compare our remote sensing techniques to theirs.”
“While the grad students play deck crew?” Sass demanded. “She’s not entitled to a free ride, Clay. Everyone has to pitch in, or it’s bad for morale.”
Clay’s eyes narrowed. “Whose morale, exactly?” He smirked when she hissed at him. “Sass, no one else wants to work with her. As your first mate, I recommend you keep her locked in her room. Have her interact as little as possible. Bet you Porter would rather sleep in med-bay than share her cabin again tonight.”
“And who could blame him?”
Clay drew close to whisper, tickling her ear. “Watch your own morale, Sass-ss. Let me handle the crew.”
“Fine!” Sass headed aft to bleed off some frustration by yanking dead pipes.
Sass carried a crate of ruptured pipes to Darren’s latest workstation in the hold. The load must have weighed 300 kilos. She didn’t quite trust the space legs of Joey and the grad students to control that kind of mass without hurting themselves.
She simply set it down and detached the grav hand grapples. For a breather, she paused to watch Darren’s lesson to Zelda and Porter. The pair faced him across a table-mounted laser saw.
“These rent pipes aren’t worth straightening. Instead, we’ll cut them into chunks and use the recycler to reform them into plastic stock. Then we extrude new pipes.”
He picked up a length of their spruce stock. Mahina farmers grew modest woods of spruce and aspen trees, irrigated by the same subsurface web of pipes that fed their fields. Aspen wasn’t good for much except the oxygen cycle and decoration. But Thrive packed along a quarter container of spruce planks and plywood.
Darren lay the board beneath the saw and squared it neatly. “Imagine this is your arm.” He added a line of grape tomatoes down its centerline. He pressed the two grad students back to stand clear.
The engineer flicked a switch. The saw lasers lit, and the upper arm of the saw slammed down to the table, then retracted. The plank was now 10-cm chunks of wood, splattered with tomato guts, wafting with the scent of grilled veggies and woodsmoke.
Darren hammered home his point. “This machine can slice steel. Keep your hair, fingers, clothing, and everyth
ing else out of the way, yes?”
Poor Zelda looked like she was about to vomit. The whole crew looked about 25. But her age was 24 in truth. Porter beside her was only 27. Sass read him as fighting not to laugh out loud.
Sass cleared her throat. “They could use the remote switch.” She pointed to the power strip supplying the saw, complete with power switch.
“Ah! Good idea,” Darren encouraged. He swiped the ‘arm’ debris into his refuse bin. “Zelda. You try first.”
Zelda looked petrified to go within a meter of that saw press. Sass took pity and clapped her shoulder. “Maybe you’d prefer to work with Corky?”
“She’s so nice!” Zelda gushed, Corky’s new temporary bunk-mate. “You wouldn’t mind, would you, Darren?”
Sass drew her away, sighing. “Careful now, Zelda. You’ll break your spine bending over backward like that. I appreciate how you’re willing to help.”
“Oh, anything I can do! Except –” She caught herself. Sass nudged her to continue up the stairs.
“Husna is surveying the planet,” Sass noted.
Zelda Maier’s specialty was atmospheric terraforming, though she was in the early days of her doctoral program and might yet switch. Sass found the terraforming disciplines more tolerable than some of MA’s other scientists. A centuries-long project involving tens of specialties fostered a more collegial than cutthroat outlook.
Zelda nodded. “Yes, I spoke to her about that. Um.” She swallowed.
“Husna is a rego bitch from hell,” Sass suggested.
Zelda blew out explosively, and half-laughed in relief. “She told me she studied my record. And when we get home, she’ll recommend me for a high school teacher. In Schuyler City, not Mahina Actual. She says I’m not smart enough to teach urbs.” She caught her lip with her teeth, cute in a childish sort of way.
Sass joined the army at 14, was a single mother by 18. She never was Zelda’s kind of young. “Husna will record the orbital survey, Zelda. You’ll be free to analyze it later. In the meantime, I appreciate a team player. I also know Dr. Eli Rasmussen in the faculty of terraforming botany. Let’s not worry about Husna’s opinion just yet. It’s a long road back to Mahina.”