Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  The scholar found a video file and played it for her. The image and sound were perfectly clear, no static. But Copeland and his environs appeared in a silvery grayscale at low resolution. Labels on coffee machines used more pixels than this.

  “Hello, this is John Copeland, president of Thrive Spaceways, owner and chief engineer of the ringship Prosper, Mahina Colony in the Aloha System. Our captain is Ben Acosta, and our science officer Teke. We’re trying to reach Captain Sassafras Collier of the starship Thrive. She and her crew departed eleven years ago en route to Sanctuary, before we discovered this FTL communications device. We’d also be happy to speak to her first mate, Clay Rocha, or her chief engineer Darren Markley, or anyone else on the Thrive. Or anyone on Sanctuary, really. Please respond.”

  Sass stared until her eyes welled with tears, and replayed the message. Cope didn’t appear any older really. His nanites aged him about one year in ten. The washed-out silver didn’t betray much detail anyway. No, it was his voice and bearing that matured. This man was fifteen years past the one she’d recruited so long ago, a beaten-down mechanic from the wrong side of the Schuyler docks, now a confident executive. And he was speaking now, across the light years.

  “How is this possible?”

  “We developed the ansible technology to communicate with our courier ships before we sent them to check on the other colonies, maybe 35 years ago. But the one we slated for the Aloha system was hijacked by a man named Belker.”

  “I know of Belker. We found his courier ship Nanomage. That’s where we found our warp drive.” Which was broken, but that could wait. “I wasn’t aware of an – ansible?”

  “It allows instantaneous communications, across light years, via some physics I don’t understand. It’s very limited. That’s why the picture is so bad. They had hopes the technology would lead to a better warp drive. But.”

  Sass smiled sadly. “You have too few people to produce more than one physicist of that caliber in a few generations. Or ever.”

  “Exactly. This message arrived a week ago. Do you want to answer him?”

  “Now?” Sass replied, startled. “I could talk to Copeland? Really?”

  “Well, as long as I can keep the robots at bay,” Silva hedged. “Hm. Let me see what I can do about that.”

  His fingers flew over the archaic keyboard, opening unfriendly white-on-black screens where he communicated in pure code. Sass understood none of it. Meanwhile she considered what to say to Cope. She knew so pitifully little yet about Sanctuary. She longed to have him by her side.

  Not that he was a better engineer than Darren Markley and Remi Roy. She probably brought better engineers with her, and felt a trifle guilty about stripping the Aloha system of two of their finest. No, what she missed so desperately about Cope was his scrappy attitude and outlook. The world sucked, he didn’t understand the tech, yet he managed to bang the damned stuff into submission anyway. His memory brought a crooked smile to her face.

  Silva’s fingers slowed to an occasional desultory tap, then dropped to his lap in defeat. “Every time I send the polebots on another errand, Shiva overrides another group to head this way. Pretty soon she’ll figure out how to lock me out.” He scowled in thought. “We could take the ansible to your ship. You’d have to take me with you. And you can’t keep it. Promise me?”

  Promise me. Sass’s heart went out to a kindred spirit. One who had no excuse to be that trusting, but did it anyway. She grinned. “Be sure to wear your hat!”

  He nodded whole-heartedly, then adjusted the neck-piece again. “Here. Take my seat. When this prompt comes up? Press this key. I’ll get the ansible.”

  Sass transfered to the control seat and performed as requested. She tried to understand what she was looking at, but it was gibberish to her. Between prompts, she took a snapshot of the screen to show her geeks, and surreptitiously made a note of his login credentials on her comms tab. Her comms couldn’t reach the ship at the moment, or Clay. Underground, this wasn’t surprising.

  Working across the room, Silva unhooked a dark box with odd fold-out antenna reminiscent of moose antlers. Like the foam cutout sort Canadians used to attach to knit winter hats, in a charcoal grey metal with a strangely oily patina. This he dumped into a plastic carton. He added a small but heavy CRT monitor like something out of the early Apollo space program, truly archaic. On top went a pile of cables, and smaller power-modulating bricks. After that he switched to adding random tools and pet projects, so far as Sass could tell.

  “I’m getting more warnings.” Sass stood decisively, and waited for one last prompt. She stabbed the keyboard one last time. “Go!” She swooped up the carton before Silva could lift it, and bounded out the door.

  115

  Darren Markley rushed into med-bay, heart pounding and out of breath. He threw himself into his wife Dot’s arms, ignoring the grad student on the bed. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you, darling!”

  Dot patted his shoulder twice. “Darren, get off me. I’m busy.”

  “But that thing, the chipping, they got me too, Dot!”

  “So sit and wait your turn.” He pouted and perched on the second stool. She reached over and tugged at the hole in his shirt, and peered through it at his arm. “Wash that. Soap and water.”

  “Yes, dear,” Darren growled, and headed for the sink. “Zelda, how are you?”

  “I feel funny,” the grad student admitted. “I mean, I’m not complaining. I would never do that.”

  Darren stripped his shirt, then opened the spigot with an elbow. “Why would you never do that?”

  Dot emitted a put-upon sigh at her monitor.

  The engineer once hoped this trip would rekindle their romance, a honeymoon through their twilit years. In retrospect, they were simply sick of each other after all these years. Close quarters were not an improvement. She even asked for permission to ‘fool around’ on Sanctuary, explore other partners as a ‘change of pace.’ The only thing that would rekindle was screaming marital warfare.

  “I mustn’t be a burden,” Zelda replied, startling him out of his cranky reverie on his wife. “Time to go to the community fields for the big game.” She started to rise.

  Dot shot out a hand and pressed her into the mattress. “Darren, close the door, and buckle her in. Computer, crew members Darren Markley and Zelda Maier are not permitted to unlock doors until further notice.”

  The computer confirmed these instructions after checking with Remi Roy, presently in charge of the ship as third officer.

  Back on his stool, Darren wheedled, “But sweetie, don’t you want to monitor me? To see an earlier stage of the chipping process?”

  “Not really,” the nurse breathed, intent on her medical imaging of Zelda’s brain.

  “I talked to one of their mayors, a Loonie, Major Petunia Ling –”

  “Why would anyone name a child ‘Petunia’? That’s just hostile.”

  Darren reflected that Dot named their firstborn Grover Vrooman Junior, after her father. Their son still bore a grudge, and went by Mark Markley. “Yes, dear. She’s age 71, and looks ancient. I mentioned our nanites kept us young –”

  “I’m busy, Darren. Is there a point to this story?”

  “She wasn’t interested in our nanites. In being young again.”

  “You met an idiot. Congratulations.” Dot zoomed her display and stuck her nose into it, a habit Darren found ever more repulsive as the years passed. She smeared fingerprints on the display, too.

  Stop that, he admonished himself. She’s a good woman plying exceptional skills. He believed it was crucial to a happy marriage to extend an honorable thought. Especially when the effort wasn’t reciprocated.

  “Dot, remember what people look like a couple years after their nanites give out? When they’re stooped over and shuffling along with joint pain? Ask them how they are, and they say they’re just waiting to die?”

  “That’s nice, dear,” Dot said, raising her head back from the screen thoughtful
ly.

  “Dot, it isn’t normal not to care whether you die. Is my point.”

  “Novel nanites in Zelda’s brain,” Dot replied. “Darren, take a look.”

  He stepped around the cot to peer into the monitor with her. He didn’t know much about brain structure. But green dots converging on the central bottleneck couldn’t be good. “Dot, get this damned thing out of my arm!”

  She picked up a hand scanner and systematically waved it around his neck and head. The screen reconfigured into a new brain display, labeled with his name instead of Zelda’s. “Too late.”

  “Dot, darling. Cut this damned thing out of me before I find a scalpel and –”

  “Such a drama queen!” Dot yelled at him. She slammed open a cabinet door and grabbed a scalpel and swabs. He hastily sat on his stool. She grabbed him by the elbow and turned him. She splashed clear liquid from a couple bottles onto his shoulder, an antiseptic followed by a mild analgesic. Then she slapped a gauze wad below the chipping entry wound. “Hold that.”

  He did as bidden. “Is this going to – OW!”

  “Yes, it’s going to hurt. Baby. Hand me the tweezers.”

  “My hands aren’t sterile. Did you even wash your hands first?”

  “Maybe not,” Dot conceded. She reached for the tweezers, then doused her fingers and instruments with the antiseptic solution. “It doesn’t matter, Darren. Our nanites are more than capable of – Well, maybe not fabric.” She transfered a pinch of cloth threads to a steel surgical bowl.

  This trash receptacle already held debris from Zelda’s arm. Darren leaned to look in. Dot rapped him on the head with the scalpel handle. “Hold still.”

  After a few more moments of painful probing, she extracted his chip and clinked it into the bowl. Then she gave him another liberal squirt of antiseptic, and shifted his wad hand to cover the wound. “Your nanites will heal the rest.”

  Darren wondered what her bedside manner might have been like without nanites. Not that it mattered. Life was pointless anyway.

  Dot rattled the bowl, making the tiny chips slither, the size of oat grains. “So chief engineer. Study the chips.”

  Darren dolefully checked his boo-boo gauze, but the bleeding already slowed. He leaned on the over-bed table and peered morosely into the tray. He blinked his way through a menu system to set his Clark Kent glasses to their maximum magnification, suitable for studying the scales on a human hair. Bacteria would take more orders of magnitude, let alone nanoscale circuitry.

  “It’s a receiver, repeater, transmitter combo, with battery,” he reported. They called it a battery, anyway. Technically it was a tiny generator that drew on the host’s biochemistry as a battery. He bet its range was sorely limited, less than room-scale. “Radio, I think. For more than that, I’d need my nanite workbench.”

  Dot rapped him on the noggin again. “What you need is a Faraday cage.” From decades of conversation, the couple knew more than they ever cared to learn about each other’s disciplines. She rummaged a cabinet, then handed him a small metal box.

  Darren picked out a foam insert bearing some lenses, then transferred the chip flakes inside and shut it.

  Dot leaned over Zelda and smoothed her hair from her face. “There, sweetie, are you feeling any better?”

  “But I wasn’t complaining!” Zelda insisted, near tears.

  Darren suggested, “Do you need to rush to a sporting event?”

  Zelda blinked. Then blinked harder. “Sports are boring to play, let alone watch.”

  Darren poked the flat metal box around with his finger. “But you still feel sad. Low energy. Incurious.” He was describing himself.

  “Huh,” Zelda agreed. “I’m always curious. Just not now.”

  Dot parked her fists on her hips and sized up her husband with pursed lips. “So how do we deactivate the nanites in your brains?”

  The very question made Darren tired. “I don’t know.”

  Dot considered this, and glanced around the med-bay. “This old Petunia, she didn’t care whether she lived or died, huh? No interest in becoming young again?”

  “What?” Darren asked. Who was Petunia?

  Dot opened a hail. “Remi, please report to med-bay.”

  “I cannot, I drive the ship. What do you need, ma chère?”

  “Drive? Where are we going?”

  “We hold station above the spaceport. The locals, they send robots. I lift the ship to avoid them. Clay plays on the regolith. Sass, I cannot call. You have problems?”

  “I have two despondent patients. We believe they used to be in contact with the AI. Now they’re just sad. Possibly suicidal. Med-bay isn’t the right place for them. Too many sharps.”

  “Two patients? Darren is also…chipped?”

  “Yes. Can’t think straight.”

  Remi dispatched Corky and Joey to transfer the patients to the galley for observation, milk and cookies.

  Darren went along meekly. He forgot to seal the box of transmitters before he left. It was getting awfully hard to think.

  116

  Sass peered around the corner of Hugo’s backwater hall into the main drag of Ganymede Too. Traffic was light on people, but polebots clustered blocking the stairway up to the sports dome. Those fields held practically the whole population of Sanctuary.

  She pulled back and readjusted her grav to 0.5g net, to make lighter work of the heavy ansible carton. “Hugo, there was a fourth staircase down from the sporting dome. What does that one lead to?”

  That was the cinder block structure closest to the airlock that held Sass’s pressure suit.

  “Just facilities. Air conditioning, recycling, hydroponic tunnels, stuff like that.”

  “Can we get there from here?”

  He grimaced. “I would look that up by accessing Shiva.”

  Sass pointed across the corridor on a diagonal. “It would be that way, right? Can we enter directly from Ganymede Too?”

  “I don’t know. There’s the motor pool.”

  That sounded more promising than having to traverse a field day crowd, or sneak through the mechanicals, sure to be crawling with robots. “Motor pool it is.”

  She sprinted up the main corridor, two halls up and to the right, and waited for the middle-aged Hugo to catch up, out of breath. This new hall seemed vacant of people and polebots, though the ubiquitous ankle-high cleaning bots remained at work. So far, none of those tried to bite her.

  Sass shifted the heavy carton to her other hip and ran to the next T-intersection, Hugo lagging. To the right, halls opened on both sides of the crossing corridor, but to the left, she spotted a single door, bearing the Ganny ladder icon, and ran for it.

  She set her gravity to 0.1g, making quick work of the twenty-meter ladder climb. At the top, she found a deserted glassed-in garage, prettily stabbed by the final few orange sunbeams of the day.

  The garage was a barrel-vault hangar dome, detached from the sporting complex. Opaque roll-up doors blocked her view of the spaceport.

  Four balloon-tired vehicles sat parked, gathering copious yellow dust. Two of the trucks sported flats, tilted 30 degrees off level. But a utility runabout still had some lift in its tires. These models were identical to the old ones Sass used for years on Mahina.

  In fact…yes, there was the air jack. She reinflated the buggy’s tires. Then she yanked open the driver’s side door, unleashing a cascade of yellow dust onto her pants. She hopped in and verified the familiar controls. The buggy showed a full charge, and half-full air tanks. And with luck – yes! The van-sized hold behind the front seats featured bench seats along the walls and a hatchback airlock.

  Crouching due to the low overhead, Sass checked the rack of breath masks back there. Each came with an exhausted air cylinder. No pressure suits. She grabbed a couple air cylinders and recharged them. By then, she heard Hugo clanging up the ladder.

  “Coming down, clear the floor.” Sass jumped straight down, and braked her fall at the end.

  Hugo stood b
ack aghast, clutching his box. “What are you?”

  Good question. It took her two trips because of his box, but she lifted them up to the garage to save him the climb. “I couldn’t find pressure suits.”

  “My uniform serves fine outdoors,” Hugo supplied. “I’m afraid for you, though.”

  Sass huffed a laugh. “Don’t be.” She clambered into the buggy.

  Hugo tarried to close the hatch over the ladder they’d used, plus a second ladder. Then he climbed into the passenger seat. “I think that other hatch must lead to the facilities compound.”

  “Oh!” Sass reconsidered. That would save time on retrieving her pressure suit. But if robots ruled here, the mechanicals were sure to be infested with them. Only to exit in plain view of 5,000 locals or so. “No, let’s try this first.”

  She flicked a switch, to pressurize the vehicle, which worked. The buggy held hours of air. For about the thousandth time, she mentally saluted a long-dead engineer with a cordial, Hey dumbass, why can’t you fill the tires with the cabin air on these things? But apparently on Sanctuary as on Mahina, nobody ever fixed that little design flaw.

  Granted, the breathable nitrogen-oxygen cabin air was more valuable than the pressurized whatever in the tires. And balloon tires more often exploded than they leaked. Still.

  She flicked the garage door opener. A red light above the door switched to throbbing red instead of opening. Sass frowned.

  “No airlock,” Hugo explained. “Or rather, the whole garage is an airlock.”

  “Oh.” Sass tapped her finger as vacuums pumped the bay’s air into its holding tanks. After five minutes or so the light turned green. The door began trundling up its tracks onto the ceiling. Sass inched out the second the gap was big enough.

  She paused and made sure the garage closed behind her properly before heading out. To leave an airlock open, especially one that size, was a crime punishable by death under some circumstances. She’d spaced a miscreant for that once.