by Ginger Booth
“Me, too,” Cope allowed. “But we talk to her on the ansible. That’s more than we expected for another dozen years.”
“But that’s the thing,” Ben argued. “She doesn’t need to lose another dozen years. And her situation sounds horrible. We should go get her.”
“And Ben sails to the rescue!” Eli tipped his glass in salute. The botanist lived with them on Prosper these days.
“He’s not sailing anytime soon,” Cope countered. “Sass doesn’t need rescue. She’s a big girl, Ben. Sooner or later, there’s bound to be some kind of colony disaster. Sass can turn one of those to her advantage.”
Abel nodded. “Those are lucrative. But Aurora, to your point, I don’t think Sass brought along anyone with the chops to negotiate a trade deal. Interesting point. When you do go, Ben, bring me along.”
“Abel Greer, what are you saying?” Jules cried in horror. “No way, no sirree-bub! We’re done with all that!”
“Why?” Abel asked. “I mean, business sucks here at the moment. And opening up trade between star systems, that’s a big deal. That’s real, Jules. Legacy stuff.”
“Oh, dear,” Cope breathed, teasing. “We’re all gonna make the rego history books, huh?”
“Not me!” Jules said, hands raised to ward off evil. “This is the first time I’ve stepped foot in space since Denali! When we got home to Mahina I dropped to my knees and kissed the ground!”
“You did not,” Ben countered with a smile. “You were too busy running to the creche to meet your babies. Cope and I didn’t outrun you, only cuz Dad brought Nico to meet us.”
His heart was full. The re-wedding was perfect – he had his brilliant husband and family back. Their breakthrough with the probe was awe-inspiring. Their 18-month odyssey to Denali could now be accomplished in hours. And they didn’t even need the planets to align. Just for this evening, he basked in success.
Tomorrow he’d itch to undock and get back into space. Because whether his husband realized it yet or not, Ben Acosta and Prosper were headed to Sanctuary as soon as he could manage it. Hang on, Sass, I’m coming to fetch you home.
130
Hugo Silva clutched his stack of deluxe nanite-blocker hoods, made by Corky. He trudged sadly toward his office by default, because it was that time of day. Getting kicked off Thrive was a new low for him.
He got on so well with the newcomers from the Aloha system. They made great strides together on understanding how Shiva had enthralled his neighbors. For years, he’d gone through the motions. What could one man do against a society of puppets? He was a computer programmer, a geek, not a social activist.
His neighbors didn’t like him much even before they turned into puppets. He hated spectator sports.
His face burned. Despite all he knew, he’d allowed his own children to become marionettes, jerked around on Shiva’s strings. He excused this because he was only one man, a single dad with three kids. Oh, when he had them home, they wore their foil hats! He let them misbehave! Say inappropriate things! Jump on the bed!
For a few hours. But then they needed to go back to school with their friends, right? His conscience twinged harder – no, it twanged – to think of his eldest, Bron, now 17. Before the nanites took over, his son was smart as a whip, charismatic as hell. Bron wasn’t geek smart like his dad. He was a born ring-leader, a verbal gerbil, and quite liked team sports. With a foil hat, Bron was still all that and spitting mad, raring to overthrow the world order and beat that Shiva into submission.
And Hugo egged him on for a few hours, then sent him back to school. He’d have kept him home, but what kind of life was that for Bron, without his friends? With a dad who could teach only the stuff he hated in school?
Hugo stood still against the hallway wall. Apparently it was adult passing time, another insipid meal shift. His fellow Gannies walked by without noticing his existence. Hell, there were only 1100 of them, including the kids. He knew them all. No one said hi. And he’d been foolish enough to take it personally, instead of solving it.
Sass left her whole world behind. She learned the Colony Corps stuck themselves with an sub-viable population. She found a warp drive, and dared to cross deep space in a crappy old asteroid hopper.
He fingered a silvery fabric helm. Corky made him extra for his kids. Such a sweet lady. A shame about the booming voice. A modest home-maker, Corky too braved deep space, left everyone she knew, over 20 years elapsed, to find and help another world.
A world that couldn’t be bothered to free itself.
In sudden resolve, Hugo’s steps quickened to his office. He grabbed screwdrivers and hammers into a bag, along with his treasured trove of aluminum foil, and the hats he’d already made for his kids.
And he marched forth to liberate the children.
At the high school creche, he found Bron, mouth hanging open, staring fixedly with his classmates at a screen at the front of the room. An elaborate diagram mapped the plot and characters, fictional and non-fictional elements of Slaughterhouse Five, an apparently grisly 20th Century novel. Good. No need to feel guilty interrupting that.
Hugo began by finding the emitters in the room, embedded in the walls. He used a screwdriver and a mallet to chip each out of the wall, and tucked them into a little Faraday cage snuff box.
When Bron finally blinked awake and looked his way, Hugo tossed him a helm in triumph. “Pick your team, son. Get these hoods on them.”
His recently slack-jawed zombie son broke into a fey grin. “It’s time? We’re gonna do it, Dad?”
“Absolutely, son! And we’re going to start with the kids!”
Bron whistled an ear-splitting hoot and started rousing his chosen band, probably his soccer team plus his girlfriend. These few got the classy chain-mail-like hoods. But once they were free of mind control, Bron put them to work fashioning helms for the rest of their friends from the aluminum foil.
Soon Bron had a crew of fairly clear-thinking hooligans. He taught them to chip out the wall emitters and block them inside a scrap of foil. Bron sent off a war party to acquire more foil.
Hugo wiped a tear of pride from his eye. Even all zombified, his son made note of where to grab stockpiles of foil come the revolution. What a good rotten kid he had!
Stiffening his resolve, Hugo moved on to salvage his twins. Raised longer in Shiva’s clutches, the younger two were commensurately stupider. Or perhaps they would have been dullards anyway, but they were his and he loved them. Bron’s hooligans reached their classroom before he did, clearing the emitters. The fifteen-year-olds were interrupted in a lesson on fractions.
Hugo shook his head in dismay. Fractions? Seriously? At 15? How low the descendants of proud Ganymede had fallen. Grandma would’ve raised hell and taken names. She probably finished calculus by this age. Hugo certainly had. He made a mental note to check what pathetic level of math accomplishment Bron reached so far. Math wasn’t his forte.
Sighing, Hugo got his Minka and Jens hooded, and teaching others the art of foil hat-making.
Oddly, no polebots yet intervened. Hugo headed to the main hallway to check.
Aha! Bron and his goons had erected barricades of overturned classroom tables to block the halls. Their numbers were swelled by older classmates. The creche included junior college, up to age 19. From behind these ramparts, they disabled the polebot army with baseball bats. As he watched, Bron fetched a felled polebot over the table by its base, then smashed its bowling-ball head in. Next he disassembled the robot for weapon parts.
“Atta boy, Bron! Sic ’em!” Hugo pumped a fist in triumph.
“Lame, Dad!” Bron assured him. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”
Right. “Let’s leave the youngest kids alone for now, son. When we’ve got the middle grades freed –”
“We liberate the cafeterias next, Dad.” Under his breath, he added, “And we free all the kids, down to babies.”
“Good idea! Carry on!” Hugo refrained from repeating the fist pump. “Let me know if I
can help. I’m…good with computers!”
“Yeah, Dad!”
At this rate, all Hugo needed to do was get out of the kids’ way. Today the Ganny quadrant, tomorrow the world! The world only offered three quadrants, after all. Sanctuary wasn’t that big a town.
Sass will be proud of me. And I’m proud of Bron!
Minka and Jens… Bron returned to see if the twins needed him.
The rampage of the Ganny sector liberation continued well into the night. At one point, Hugo caught a glimpse of Commander Lumpkin, their mayor, a block away. She was bleeding from the forehead and directing traffic. Whether she sought to counteract the rioting children or help them, he wasn’t sure. A wave of irate older Gannies swept her out of view.
Freeing Sanctuary wasn’t an overwhelming task after all. He just never had a good answer for the question, Then what?
But it didn’t matter. Once everyone could think again, he didn’t need to supply the answers. And if Sass crossed deep space from Aloha, a system they presumed dead, maybe they could pack up and go there. Three whole worlds, after all.
131
Back on Sanctuary, Sass led the morning run, a quick five laps of the ship to start their day. The gang was a half dozen this morning.
As she made the gravity turn from the ceiling down the starboard bulkhead, Zelda exploded out of the med-bay, grinning ear to ear. “I’m nanite-free! Woot!” She leapt onto the wall and ran to throw her arms around Sass in glee, then laughed and hugged Porter and Joey next.
“Your mood sure improved!” Sass grinned at Darren, who looked jealous.
“Oh, I feel so good!” Zelda squealed, and traded bear-hugs with Corky, just coming off the ceiling. Better her than me, Sass thought. Corky’s bear-hugs made her ribs ache. Zelda went on to give Clay and Remi pecks on the cheek, still glowing beatifically.
Dot, standing on the hold floor 90 degrees off from everyone else, called up, “Zelda, tell them about the Farmer’s Joy!”
“Oh, yeah! You probably didn’t know, but I’ve always suffered a little social anxiety. Anxious to please, don’t want be a burden, afraid to speak up.”
“A people-pleaser,” Sass acknowledged wryly, the young scientist’s most obvious trait.
“Exactly! And Husna really intimidated me. And you, Sass!”
Sass decided the run was over, and flipped a somersault down to the deck beside Dot. “Me? Intimidating?”
“You sort of are,” Zelda insisted. She got a running start, attempting to match Sass’s somersault, but at zero-g. This left her slowly rolling in mid-air towards Sass and Dot, unable to stop rotating. Loath to make a mistake in public, and having spent most of the trip in stasis, Zelda’s zero-g acrobatics remained sub-par for Thrive.
Sass helpfully snagged her out of mid-air and positioned her feet to release her to gravity. Then she needed to stabilize Porter, too, as he also launched an inexpert flip. The remaining runners easily made it to the floor without hiccup.
Dot prompted, “The point was, Zelda feels better than ever.”
“Absolutely! I mean, I woke up this morning thinking, why is Husna studying this phosphorescent chemical? I should take that over! And normally I’d like cringe. No, I couldn’t do that! But of course I can. Chemistry and hydrology are much closer to my specialty. And she can do whatever she’s doing, and we can compare notes. Before I would have stopped myself, afraid to talk to her. How crazy is that?”
“Doesn’t sound crazy to me,” Porter muttered. “Woman’s a dragon.” Remi back-fisted him lightly, and Porter laughed. Happily for Porter, Husna didn’t believe his specialty, agronomy, mostly soil science, bore any meaningful relation to geology. Sass disagreed, but Porter enjoyed the verdict.
“Maybe a teeny bit manic,” Sass allowed, sharing a smile with Dot. “But I’m so pleased for you, Zelda! You don’t miss your nanites?”
“Never want a nanite to touch me again as long as I live! So Corky, I’m sorry, but I quit as scullery maid. I’m raring to go with science and tech challenges today!” Zelda pumped a fist. “Captain, lay it on me! What can I tackle?”
“Actually, maybe you could collect water from the colony,” Sass mused. “Remi, I don’t want you or Husna touching the municipal water until Zelda checks it out. But we should be able to collect a first batch today, Clay?”
“I’ll confirm after breakfast. But that was the plan.”
“Good! A third of our water stores shouldn’t be too much for the shuttle to carry, right? A pallet or two. And I’ll drive. And Porter!”
“Why me?” Porter inquired. He understood the town water might carry the same contaminant, but. “I’ll be wearing a pressure suit.”
“The nanite-killing agent seeped through Remi and Husna’s pressure suits.”
Porter recoiled. “That’s…”
“Worrying,” Zelda confirmed, looking delighted. “I’m so eager to explore this chemistry! Who knew there was such a risk to Mahina’s medical tech? Fascinating!”
“Clearly we need a rheostat to power her down a notch,” Clay suggested. “But Sass, why are you going to the colony?”
She squinted a smile at him. “Because I’m captain.”
“Captain stays with ship. Not shuttle.”
“Captain goes where she says. Because I’m the boss.”
Clay glowered. “Zelda – No. Porter. Make sure the captain doesn’t stray into Sanctuary. Or Cupid.”
Porter raised a finger. “How would I –?”
“You wouldn’t,” Sass assured him. “Listen up, everybody! Circle round. Remi, get Husna down here. We’re changing agenda.”
“Sass, we agreed to wait,” Clay growled.
“No, Clay, you thought we should wait. I disagreed. I win. Because I’m the captain. The new agenda is, we prepare to blow this town and return to Mahina.” Sass raised a hand to forestall objections. “We’ve been here over a month, with little to show for it. I still want to develop a relationship, accomplish some technology transfer. Hell, maybe even bag a new ship or two from the gift shop on the way out.”
Joey and Porter, in cryo during Sass’s first battles against Rosie the AI, looked baffled. Corky promised to explain later. Zelda was too blissed out to care.
Sass pressed on. “But to get anything from these people, we need to bargain from a position of strength. A position that says we don’t need nuthin’ from them and their rego robots. Paradoxical, but true. Beggars get nothing but scraps, and they begrudge us that much.
“So instead, we get ready to leave. Hasta la vista, baby! For that, we need water, fuel, warp drive.”
Corky ventured, “We could use fresh soy protein.”
“True,” Sass agreed. “But we’d survive without it. Especially because we hope to use Cope and Teke’s newfangled, instantaneous warp back to Mahina! Someday.”
Darren said, “I wouldn’t volunteer on the first ship to –”
“Of course not,” Sass agreed. “We couldn’t if we tried. The Prosper crew needs to send us the warp drive. That means they go first.”
“Or they send a care package,” Clay quibbled. “If they can get a probe to work, they could send this stuff without a crewed ship.”
Sass paused. “Fair,” she conceded. “We don’t really have enough fuel to go fetch cargo.”
Remi scowled, arms crossed. “No margin for error. I veto this idea. Chief Markley, you veto. Clay veto.”
“Provisionally,” Clay agreed.
Sass raised a hand to stop their objections. “You’re missing the point. It could be years before Cope’s warp drive can even send their first probe. But to negotiate from strength, we must appear ready to walk away. Clay, I’ll call Hugo out to the spaceport to visit with me. He and I might take a stroll onto Cupid. But of course I wouldn’t violate their courier ship. Like, steal anything. Just reconnoiter.”
Clay sighed loudly. “You stay here. I reconnoiter.”
“No. Thanks, everybody! There you have it, our new agenda.”
&nb
sp; They looked underwhelmed. Her engineers, Remi and Darren, looked particularly disgruntled, and conferred behind their hands. She suspected Clay’s stone face meant he maintained decorum for morale’s sake. Later he’d drag her into their cabin and blast her an earful.
“Well, I’m ready for breakfast!” Sass asserted cheerily, and set off clanking up the stairs to the catwalk. “It’s going to be a great day!”
By 15:30 that afternoon, the sun rose on Sanctuary spaceport as Sass arrived with her team. She deposited a couple pallets of empty water drums, clutched below the shuttle by grav tractor, next to the pumping facilities. Then she settled her craft between the pump-house and the parked courier ship Cupid, eyeing it appraisingly.
As Clay had negotiated with the Martian mayor Tharsis, no robots stood on the port’s hard-top. One extra vehicle gave her pause. A balloon-tired three-wheeler approached with grey-clad rider. She zoomed in her windshield to see his face. Good, that was Hugo Silva.
She brought along one of their comms tablets for him, but hadn’t delivered it yet. The downside of turning off Shiva’s nanites was that he was no longer hooked into Sanctuary’s sole communications and information network, except when seated at his computer. The three mayors suffered the same handicap.
“Ready, Zelda? Go fetch your sample,” the captain invited. “Ah, Porter. Why don’t you go along, in case the valves need extra muscle. Don’t get wet.”
Porter nodded and affixed his helmet. Zelda bounded to the airlock and did the same.
“Zelda?” Sass prompted. “Could you perform your tests at the pump?”
“Certainly!”
Porter took the hint and picked up her equipment and the toolbox. He set down her heavy case in the airlock. Zelda could carry her own. The shuttle airlock door hissed closed behind them.
Sass shook her head. “Comms check.” In a couple minutes, Porter got Zelda responding on the right suit channel. They’d both been out of stasis and working for over a month now, but Zelda spent most of that time as a weepy scullery maid. “So very green.”