by Ginger Booth
“Alright,” Dot breathed.
Sass considered probing for whether Darren had some particular underlying medical condition she should be concerned with. But no, medical ethics constrained Dot, whereas Darren was free to share or not share whatever he wanted. She stood by her decision. “I’ll visit Husna, too.”
“I go with you,” Remi announced, clambering off the cot. “To Husna. Promise me.”
“I’m not sure that’s wise, Remi. Your age difference may have seemed small –”
“No! The opposite,” Remi argued. “Now, Husna looks maybe my age. You, Dot, Clay, you never age. You don’t understand what it’s like. I do.”
“You care about her, don’t you?”
“But of course. We go now.”
They found Husna in her cabin, mortified to be seen. Sass assured her that she looked fine. Compared to settlers only a few years ago, still in their twenties, the old woman looked healthy. The slight loss to her skin’s youthful elasticity began to show off her bones to better effect, granting her face a harsh strong beauty.
Glancing nervously to Sass, Remi said these corny things, and held Husna’s hands in his own. The geologist seemed to drink up his earnest sincerity, and relax.
Sass smiled softly, and squeezed Remi’s shoulder. “This is good news, Husna. A few weeks is nothing to women our age.”
“My hair is turning grey. Here.” The geologist tapped her temple.
Sass grinned. She had more grey hair at 30 back on Earth. “You can bleach the rest to match. We did that on Denali, and cropped our hair to a couple centimeters long. You look a lot like Kassidy Yang. Trust me, she looked great in short white hair.”
“Now you’re making fun of me,” Husna grumbled.
“How so?”
“Me, like Kassidy Yang!”
“Hm.” Sass tilted her head and considered Husna. “No, I think you’re more beautiful. Can’t touch her charisma and acrobatics. But who can? I’ll leave you two alone.”
Sass’s next stop, Darren, wasn’t so easy. His initial reaction was to demand this water to make him himself again instantly. Only as Sass gently presented Dot’s reservations did he have second thoughts.
“I have disorders that run in my family,” he admitted. “Easily controlled by nanites. Diabetes and Alzheimer’s. Um…”
“I know what they are,” Sass assured him. “You forget, I come from a time before nanites. On Mahina, I lived and worked among settlers who never had nanites. They died young.”
“Of course,” Darren agreed. “I don’t know that Dot has the means to treat my conditions, save nanites. The damage should be reversible. If it’s only a few weeks doing without.”
“Then she’s right? We should prove out this theory before risking you?And in the meantime, you should avoid the lake water.”
Darren nodded abstractedly. “You know, Sass, my first reaction was ‘Eureka!’ We could hose the locals with the magic water. Free them all. But if their only health care is Shiva, that might be dangerous. Those poor children, completely untrained to care for themselves. And useless adults. Ideally, you should test this water on someone who’s been under Shiva’s control for years, and check how their cognition recovers.”
“Interesting!” the captain murmured. “Kids have fallen into the lake. Hugo mentioned his son Bron fell in. I don’t know if I can get honest data about that. I can try. But as for you, think about it?”
He nodded solemnly.
Last stop on Sass’s list, Zelda was easy. “I want it now! Please!”
Clay stuck his head into her office to announce, “I’m back. I hear you’ve had developments.” He came in and took a seat while she brought him up to date.
“I made progress, too,” Clay shared. “I laid on the guilt trip pretty thick, flying into Sanctuary. About how Mahina was a desert world. During the terraforming we worked outside under the grueling sun. How to my captain, refusing us water was beyond the pale, contemptible. I talked Tharsis around.”
“Good news! Well done, Clay!”
“I’m not sure you’ve thought this through, Sass,” he cautioned. “He’s going to step up water purification. It’ll take a week or two, several trips into the spaceport to top off Thrive.”
“Hurry up and wait some more.”
“And don’t knock over the beehive in the meantime.”
“Dammit,” Sass conceded.
“Our backup plan, building our own distillery? No way. Especially you and me, we can’t touch the water. Unless you’re feeling suicidal. But as captain, you don’t have that right.”
Sass hadn’t considered what would happen if their nanites were also susceptible to the water. They could downgrade to Yang-Yangs, sure. But what if their artificial consciousness actually resided in the nanites now? They could be comatose, or lose all their identities, their memories. Clay was the one who liked to play chicken with mortality, not her. Death hurt. She reached to hold his fidgeting hand. “Promise me, Clay. You won’t walk out on me, either.”
He scowled. “We’ll bring home a vial.”
“Clay, I can’t make your life worth living. I’d ask if I could make you happier somehow, but I can’t.” In fact, she quite resented the way he made his happiness her problem. “I appreciate you. Love you, even. Enjoy your company. What more do you want from me? I can’t make you the center of my universe. Thrive is that. The crew, and Prosper as well. Hell, even Mahina. I can treasure you as a great playmate, an excellent second in command, and a wizard with databases. And for all the history we share.”
“But you’ve got Loki to remember Earth with now.”
She grinned. “I am enjoying that. Earlier he told me about a mission in Virginia. His team dove into the Pentagon to retrieve ‘classified items’. That’s worse than our sea floor trek to retrieve Nanomage! They snaked an airline down from the surface into the labyrinth, and recharged their tanks on the fly.”
To her surprise, Clay’s eyes narrowed. “I read about that. In a book. That mission happened before you were born.”
“It sounds wild! Oh, you mean, that couldn’t have been Loki. Well, the Pentagon probably held plenty of stuff worth diving for.”
“True,” he allowed, but still looked suspicious. “Be careful what you tell him, Sass. He’s fishy.”
“You’re so paranoid!” Sass hastily amended her tone. She was trying to be conciliatory. “You’re right. No one on this planet is really our friend.”
“Hugo Silva is. Don’t piss him off again.” He rapped her desk and rose to depart.
“Clay, I’m still going to talk to everyone about our new agenda.”
“Wait until we’ve secured the water.”
“We could steal the water…”
“Do I need to put you in the brig, Sass?” Annoyed, he continued out the door.
“We don’t have a brig!” she retorted as the door snicked closed behind him. “Rego hell!”
The Cupid could leave any day, and along with it her best chance to score a warp drive and fuel. Granted, it probably wasn’t enough fuel to reach Mahina. But if Clay kept getting all prickly about taking what they needed, she could be stuck on this planet for years.
129
“Wow, guys,” Ben Acosta breathed, alone on Prosper’s shuttle. He’d just powered up their next generation micro-warp for the first time. Several hours travel above the rings of Pono, and another hour’s travel to get clear of his spaceship, Ben gazed at the amazing fractal light show of their warp gate.
“I don’t know about your readings, but from here it looks rock steady. No rotational drift. No running green filaments. Dead still.”
Over the comms channel, Teke offered, “On our old diagnostics, it looks the same as it always did.”
Elise clarified, “On my new diagnostics, it reads dead steady as you report. To within a thousandth of one percent.”
She’d built new instruments to detect the movements Ben reported, to make sure her new warp antlers solved the problem
. She took her time building the replacements, and constructed several pairs to select the most perfect mirror copies. Cope had likewise gone to insane lengths to ensure perfectly matched circuitry to deliver identical power to both horns.
They had the time. The probes were their bottleneck this past month. The team had time to visit with family and tweak to their hearts’ content while Cope’s hired hands built the new components, and Cope himself devised the cast-a-gate mechanism, offset from the warp generating ship.
“My compliments to the chefs,” Ben purred. “Sure I can’t take a little trip to Denali and test this baby out?”
“Our wedding is tomorrow,” Cope growled. “Remember? You’re not going anywhere.”
Ben shrugged a grin. He had no intention of skipping out on the re-marriage ceremony. His father and all three kids awaited them at Mahina Orbital for the low-key affair. All their friends from Thrive’s Denali trip would be there, save Sass and Clay. His pals Captain Lavelle of the Gossamer and Captain Gorky of the Heavenly Bodies were docked at MO, too. They flipped a coin at his bachelor’s party last night to decide on Lavelle to officiate at the wedding. Captain Acosta could hardly carry out the ceremony himself on Prosper.
Sass married them the first time, on Thrive, parked in what became Schuyler Spaceport.
“Spoilsport,” Ben teased. “Probe ready? We’re burning prodigious fuel.”
“Looks good on our end,” Cope reported. “Now calibrating with Sora on Denali.”
This first test was highly ambitious, all the way to Denali orbit. Where Ben trusted the poor probe would crash and burn into the planet’s dense and turbulent atmosphere. But Teke and Cope felt this was the ideal test. The probes were too expensive for them to build three or four to work their way up. Instead they elected to go for the gold and broadcast measurements out the wazoo. And the probe would surely find any remaining errors in their system during its brief lifespan.
“Ben, we are go for probe,” his husband-to-be-again reported. “Initiate countdown.”
“Ooh, I get to do it? Cool! Probe launch in 10-9-8…3-2-1-Go!” He had no visuals on the probe itself. The thing was 30 klicks away, and too small to see. The fractal flower didn’t blink or anything. “Um, did it go?”
Someone clicked him in to overhear Sora’s amazement from Denali – in real time, no lag, over their moose-bot comms. “My stars, Cope, its orbit is not decaying!”
“That can’t be,” Cope argued. “Even if we got it perfect, it should degrade and fall eventually.”
Ben powered down the micro-warp, as Teke gushed, “Cope, with these numbers the probe will decay into atmo after orbiting ten times. On the nose!”
“Well, hell,” Cope complained. “That doesn’t give us any error bar at all.” They all cracked up, whooping at having nailed the probe’s maiden voyage!
The captain in his lonely shuttle bit his tongue rather than ask why they’d chosen ten orbits as their goal. “Acosta heading back. Congratulations, guys and gal!”
“Good job, Ben!” Cope assured him. Teke and Elise were too busy slaking their thirst for raw data.
“Thanks, Cope. Don’t worry about me. Enjoy your moment.”
With ten orbits to go, Ben calculated they’d be up past 03:00 to watch the probe’s fiery final dive into Denali. Good thing he’d scheduled the re-wedding for supper time.
After he plotted his course back to Prosper, Ben called the family to report success.
His dad, Nathan Acosta, wiped a tear from his eye. “I’m so proud of you, son! Just…rego impressed as hell!”
The captain and three kids stared at the man, Ben’s face burning. His dad hadn’t praised Ben in years. “Just the bus driver, Dad. Kids, your other dads are the heroes today.” Cope and Teke earned that.
“When will it be announced on the networks?” Nathan asked. “With video?”
Ben laughed. “Not my department. Check with Kassidy. But I bet she’ll wait til we’re all back at MO so she can make us squirm on screen. Kids, you want to be in on the interview for once?”
Nathan scowled, and sniffed the last of his tears away. “Benjamin Acosta, you will not advertise your business using these children.”
“I’m not a child,” Nico argued, the eldest at 16, and Ben’s by adoption. They were all legally Ben’s, though Socrates, Teke’s biological son with Cope, was more of a technicality than an adoption. He and Cope were married at the time.
“Fine, Dad,” Ben waved this away. “But I predict Kassidy will show wedding footage if we don’t produce the kids during the interview. You try to stop her. Love you! See you soon!”
Wow, he thought yet again, as he relaxed in the pilot’s seat. The last thing he expected was a first-pass, slam-dunk success. He was remarrying John Copeland because he loved the man, not the engineer. But every once in a while, like right now, he was blown away by the talent of the man he fell in love with. Whether Kassidy Yang could convey this achievement to the masses was another story. But Ben knew what it meant.
Many steps of follow-through remained. But Cope and Teke just reunited humanity across the stars. He was humbled by his role. Ben couldn’t wait to tell Sass.
He chuckled. Just how many preliminary steps could Cope demand before anyone could take that giant leap? Warp to Sanctuary in zero elapsed time to Sass’s eleven years? The engineer would no doubt prefer a dozen steps. Their credit line could afford maybe one or two.
On his return to Prosper, Ben ducked in on the team to deliver congratulatory hugs. But he quickly got out of their hair to pilot the ship back to MO. They were still deep in their data as he opened the cargo ramp in dock. The three kids flying at him, he expected, and the hug from his dad.
What he failed to anticipate was a grav lifter full of stores, and Jules Greer on a mission. “It’s about time, Ben Acosta! I got a wedding party to cook for!”
Abel Greer caught him in a hug. “Best to get out of her way when she’s like this.”
“I remember!” Ben assured him. “Looking forward to it! Hey, buy you a drink? Cope will be geeking out for hours.”
Abel laughed. “And the kids’ll geek out on the wedding cake construction. You’re on!”
Ben eddied out of the throng to sit on the couch for a moment in Prosper’s galley. The ceremony in Gossamer’s hold was lovely, and Jules’ supper spread stupendous. The flowing wine and his constant mellow smile were beginning to wear him out.
Sassafras Acosta-Copeland – Frazzie to friends and family, largely on account of her frizzy mane – flounced to a seat beside her own personal dad, his only biological offspring in the brood.
“Your dress is gorgeous, sweetie,” he assured her. “And I love your hair in the braids. Did my dad pick out that outfit?” She even wore pearls woven into her hair.
“Of course not. Jules and Portia took me shopping, and Kassidy did my hair.” Jules and Abel’s twins, Portia and Hamlet, a year and a half older than Fraz, ducked through the crowd today too, looking resplendent and devious. Ham already made off with a bottle of champagne. Ben was floored by how much Portia’s figure had blossomed since he last saw her. She towered a good 8 cm over her boy twin.
At 11, Fraz was coming along in a womanly direction as well, though Ben didn’t care to look too closely at his daughter’s bust.
“I lost a bet with Kassidy,” Fraz confided. “I bet her a credit you’d wear a wedding dress.”
Ben laughed. Fat chance he’d declare himself a frill like that in front of the world – three worlds if Kassidy had any say in it, as she surely would. “Why me and not Dad?” Ben was Dad-B. Teke was Dad-T, and Nathan Granddad. But Cope was simply Dad.
“Is this an IQ test?” Fraz returned with a vinegar smile. “I can’t imagine Dad in a dress. He’s wearing steel-toed cowboy boots. To a wedding.”
“He is,” Ben agreed. “He looks great. That’s kind of sad, though, that my friend Kassidy knows me better than you do, huh?” Always a space captain, he was never around much.
&n
bsp; “Nah, she’s just old like you.”
Jules drifted toward them and caught that last. She laughed out loud. “Frazzie, they’re about to cut the cake. Want to help?”
“Thank you, Jules,” Ben breathed. “Always and for everything. But Fraz is really proud of that dress, and the cake is magnificent.”
“Of course,” Jules purred. “Now that you’re remarried, can we keep the house?”
The two couples bought a mansion together when they returned from Denali, raising their kids together from opposite wings. Abel called out, “Jules, we agreed not to bring that up!” This brought a gaggle of guys shifting toward Ben. Cope even claimed a seat in Frazzie’s spot beside him.
“What I want to know,” Aurora butted in, joining the circle, “is when we’ll have monthly service between Denali and Mahina.” The bald Denali envoy hadn’t returned home in all this time.
Ben shrugged. “I want to know when we’re going to Sanctuary to pick up Sass.”
“Me, too,” Abel surprised him. “And they’re connected. Aurora, did you hear that Sanctuary has a whole collection of space ships? Sorry, Cope.”
Cope founded the Thrive Spaceways company to build next-generation space ships to serve the Aloha system. So far demand kept failing to meet the cost of such ships, while slowly the reliability of the old ships failed, and their numbers dwindled.
Aurora argued practically, “But what can we trade them for ships? Sounds like Sass barely got them to talk to her.”
Cope raised his glass, “To Sass Collier and Clay Rocha, and the new crew of the Thrive! Wish you were here!” Everyone drank to that.
“But I do wish she were here,” Ben complained to Cope. “I hate to think of her stranded. She and Clay should be hugging us today. Sass would love this party!”
“Hear, hear,” Jules murmured. Kassidy probably would have agreed. But the vid star was busy choreographing a half dozen camera drones as they swooped around this conversational group and the cake.