by Ginger Booth
Once they cycled out, Hugo cycled in, happy to set aside his breathing mask.
“I like your wheels!” Sass greeted him. “That looks much more fun than the trucks. Where are those parked?”
“Loonie vehicle garage. They’ve got all sorts. Two-legged, three-wheeled, paddy wagons. It’s a shared facility with the Martians. We Gannies don’t go outside much.”
They settled in to socialize while Sass babysat Zelda by comms. The captain wasn’t going anywhere until her two junior crew proved they knew what they were doing. No, appeared to be the answer. After an epic struggle figuring out how to open a water valve, Zelda took fifteen minutes to arrive at the happy conclusion that the water was pure and phosphor-free. Sass bit her tongue rather than explain to doctoral candidates how to connect a water hose to a water barrel and fill it. They’d figure it out.
“I’m being subversive,” Hugo shared in a rush. “I wasn’t going to tell you. But I started by breaking Shiva’s emitters in the age 15-19 creche.” He regaled her with tales of the revolution.
Sass’s eyebrows rose, delighted. “Teenagers on the loose! And did it work? Do they think clearly?”
“Well, they’re teenagers,” Hugo qualified. “But they’re working outward from the creche, destroying emitters to free people from Shiva’s control. My son is leading the way. I’m very proud of him. Bron, my eldest.”
“You should be! You never mentioned your wife?”
“I never married. Oh, you mean the other parent? Their eggs came from Aloha settlers. Since we had all those pilfered genetic samples, we Gannies chose to outbreed until they ran out. For the widest possible genetic variation.”
Sass smiled sadly. “But weak on family.”
“I have a lady colleague with similar-aged offspring, three each. We get together for a family holiday once a year.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Six kids. Really exhausting.”
“I bet. Now I want to go into town and see the ruckus!”
“No, captain. You must not cross the threshold. This must be our own revolt.”
You’re a smart man, Hugo Silva. Sass’s respect for him grew by leaps and bounds. “Your call. I’ve got your back. But won’t Shiva just send robots to fix the comms emitters?”
“I believe she’s run out of spares. She could ramp up production. But the first few a robot replaced. The kids destroyed the new emitters and the robots. Now they stay broken.”
“Outstanding, Hugo. I’m so impressed!”
Sass debated telling him about the lake water’s effect on nanites, why she was lurking in the shuttle instead of out supervising her newbies. In the end, she decided to tell him, along with her reservations. What kind of psychological effect would it have on people to suddenly think for themselves after years as a puppet? And the effect on youth, with more pliable brains, might be very different from adults.
Hugo nodded through this explanation with a hungry gleam in his eye. The man wanted his kids free of Shiva. Sass was glad someone on Sanctuary gave a damn about his progeny.
“Well, my crew has mastered filling a barrel,” Sass said. “We should get a move on. Ready to visit Cupid?”
132
Sass loaned Hugo an air bottle, since his air supply was built into his wheeler, like the horses. He had no comm channel, but her space helmet featured external speakers and microphone.
Once through the airlock, he automatically started for the door lock on the courier. Sass caught his elbow and instead drew him underneath the craft. They had to duck, since its support struts lifted its belly less than two meters above the hard-top.
Sass easily found the trapdoor, much like the one on Thrive. This was how they entered Nanomage the first time. Except in that case, the door was open for a swim-up entrance into the ship’s air pressure. No such luck here. With gauntleted finger, she tried the open button. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.
She stepped back to let Hugo try. To her astonishment, he easily tapped in the release code. The trapdoor lights blinked red in their familiar pattern, wait for cycling, the same as on Thrive.
“I did that to impress you,” Hugo confided impishly.
“You succeeded!”
“Five years subjective I lived on one of these,” he reminded her. “Shiva didn’t change the codes. We’re in.” The doors dropped, and they ducked in.
“Let me do the talking to the ship,” he cautioned as the lock cycled. “Cupid’s AI has no reason to object to me.”
Sass nodded. “Be sure to ask atmo composition. Then fuel levels.”
“Oh, you can ask me any question you want. Just don’t ask Computer. They’re not very bright.”
Just as Sass suggested, once in, Hugo asked the computer for human-breathable air right after he asked for lights.
“Air mix is human-compatible but stale,” the computer replied. “Estimated time to refresh ten minutes.”
Sass had a vivid memory of Nanomage on first meeting. “Hey! It doesn’t use hectours!” She didn’t bother to wait, and took off her helmet immediately. The computer was right. The air was stale, but light years better than Nanomage’s noxious brew of argon and sulfuric fumes on first meeting.
“No, Cupid had a Martian crew. My ship didn’t use hectours, either. Mixed crew. Old Gannies still thought that way. But Martians and Loonies are in the majority here, so Sanctuary uses that 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds crap. So inconvenient for calculations.”
“It is,” Sass agreed, and chose not to bring up the inches and feet and miles, and ounces and pounds of her childhood. “Fuel?”
He looked askance at her, but obliged. His game of twenty questions corroborated his claim to know these ships intimately. Cupid didn’t have the fuel to return to the asteroid belt, though it could reach orbit and stay there for years.
Sass wandered through the hold while her companion extracted meaning from the AI, whom he assured her was independent of Shiva by primary directive. Shiva could order it to crash itself, and it might begin to obey. But if so, he could override it.
She studied the crowded hold full of mining equipment, samplers and corers and metallurgical testing machines. Unlike the devices she was slightly familiar with, many of these were designed to be self-propelling. Remi would love to get his hands on them.
The hold was far more compact than Thrive’s empty core, the overhead only 4 meters up, lower even than Sass’s catwalk.
“Computer, stop accepting directions from Sanctuary Control,” Hugo attempted on a whim.
“Unable to comply in Sanctuary air space,” the ship replied.
“Computer, emergency override. Do not accept instructions from Sanctuary Control.”
Sass grinned back at him amused. She didn’t think he’d win the argument, but she could be wrong.
She clambered over the orderly ranks of solid lug-tread wheels to reach the engine compartment. Its door opened with nary a creak of objection. Hugo followed along, still deep in his negotiations.
The star drive was shielded, not emitting its noon-day glare. It stood only waist-high instead of the familiar 3-meter column, and narrower than her newer drive, filched from Nanomage. She had to wait for Hugo to tell the computer to bring up the lights for her. Unlike the familiar courier, this engine room had a U-shaped deep closed bench running around the periphery, with a straight spur to the backside of the short column of the star drive. Sass felt like she was in a buggy’s spare tire well.
“Fuel storage?” she asked Hugo, pointing at the bench and its rounded corners.
He frowned. “Our star drive looked like yours. The whole bench is new. But probably.”
“Schematics?”
He shook his head, and sighed. “Shiva doesn’t keep notes in human-readable form. Not when she does the engineering. Or the science.”
“She does science?”
Hugo rocked his head so-so. “She invented this generation of star drive, by continuing a systematic exploration begun by the original developers. I’m not sure where
to draw the line between science and engineering.”
“Can my drive burn this drive’s fuel?”
He stepped over and rapped his knuckles on the bench protruding from the bulkheads. “I’m sure it’s pressurized in its gaseous form. Without the specs for this tank, I’m not sure I’d risk opening it.”
He didn’t bother to follow up with the computer. Neither he nor Sass was competent to ask the right questions for that. Sass couldn’t ask Thrive’s engineers from here, because Shiva might listen in and get nervous.
He asked the computer Sass’s question of how this drive compared to her Nanomage-vintage third generation drive. The details flew over her head, but it was about twice as powerful and its fuel twice as efficient. Not as revolutionary an advancement as Nanomage’s drive over its second-gen predecessor, but an impressive technological advance to bring home to Aloha, nonetheless.
Hugo returned to coaxing the ship into accepting him as captain. The patient AI wasn’t buying it, on the grounds that he wasn’t qualified.
Sass checked the closet where they’d found the warp drive on Nanomage. Cupid had one, though she couldn’t spare the time to feed it power and try its self-test. The temptation to filch it was overwhelming. Not yet, she decided.
“Ansible this way.” She led Hugo into the snug captain’s office. There they found the moose-bot device still plugged in.
“Try it,” Hugo invited. “Maybe Prosper?”
Sass turned it on and pointed to the screen. “Limited menu. This moose-bot can call Sanctuary Control. And ‘cache.’ I guess that’s in…Nozomu orbit?” Clay mentioned that Cupid scouted that one. The Prosper gang mentioned they found their ansible in a cache left by Belker’s Nanomage in Pono’s rings.
“You have a phenomenal memory, captain. I’d forgotten Cupid visited Nozomu, and I crewed one of these ships.”
One of the upsides to being a biological AI. Good memory. Sass wasn’t tempted to explain that.
Hugo reached past her and clicked a hamburger icon, three parallel lines. This brought up a navigation menu, including ‘All Nodes.’ Selecting that item brought up a much larger collection of moose-bots to choose from.
“Hello!” Sass studied the ordering and narrowed down the most likely candidate for the Pono cache ansible, now housed on Prosper. “Can I rename this label?”
“I wouldn’t if I could,” Hugo reasoned. “Although Shiva can’t monitor ansible comms directly.”
“You never mentioned that. I assumed Shiva monitored all comms.”
Hugo clarified, “All digital comms. The ansibles are quantum analog, not her bag. Ansible research died with the physicist who discovered the possibility. No one else understood his math. Shiva never made these, never interfaced with him. Your friends’ hail through the ansible came direct to me.”
“Interesting. Let’s try it!” Sass clicked her suspected link to Pono.
Almost immediately, Teke’s face came on screen, though he was looking to his right, and held up a wait finger. “Ten more minutes, Sora.”
“Hey, Teke!” Sass grinned broadly. “Say hi to Sora for me.”
Teke recoiled and stared. “Sass! Wait. You’re calling from…Nozomu?”
“It’s a colony system, and I’m not there. Just checking out another courier ship, the Cupid. Never call me here. But check out the hamburger menu – three parallel lines at top right of the screen.”
His visage was replaced by a grasping hand. “Oh, wow. I thought that was a logo.”
Sass introduced him to Hugo and explained that he was on a courier crew like Belker’s, except to the Cantons/Steppe system.
“Software, information technology, and AIs are my specialty,” Hugo added.
Teke blinked. “That’s remarkably broad. I wouldn’t call it a specialty.”
“Well, yeah,” Hugo allowed. “We only have five thousand people here.”
Teke nodded matter-of-factly. “Any other tricks to this device?”
“Not really. All of its settings are on that menu. Oh – including the ability to set up an answering page and recorded greeting. None of the cache ansibles would have initialized that. Because no one would return to check for messages.”
“Very cool.” Teke’s face disappeared behind his hand again while he studied the menu in greater detail. “Broadcast. What’s that?”
“It calls every other ansible. No message or anything. The receiving nodes emit a chime and record who sent it. And send back a receipt. They aren’t really capable of one-to-many communication. None of the ansibles have been in use for decades.”
“Teke!” Elise Pointreau interrupted from off-screen, in a lilting Sagamore accent. “Have you forgotten Sora?”
“Sorry, Sass, gotta go! Any message for Cope and Ben?”
“I’ll talk to them soon,” Sass assured him. “Bye! Oh, wait! How was your big probe test?” But he’d already disconnected. “Hugo, what’s that clanking?” They’d been so amused with calling another star system, that she hadn’t noticed the noise right here. But it was coming closer.
He glanced out the door and blanched. “Uh…bots.”
“Time to go then.” Sass flicked off the ansible and jumped to her feet. Indeed, one of the smaller devices from the hold busily climbed the steep ladder stairs. Sass pulled in front of Hugo and kicked it off the rungs. The spindly machine crashed into a bigger one, also on the move.
Hugo begged, “Computer, disable mining equipment in the hold!”
“Unable to comply. Mining equipment is under instructions from Sanctuary Control.”
133
Sass studied the robot movements in Cupid’s hold. If they were trying to reach her, they were hobbled in their aims. The little one could roll over the treads on the big ones. The rest stood locked into position by each other’s bulk. They shuffled back-and-forth like a children’s puzzle game. That was the good news.
The bad news was that most of them cut rock for a living. They waved claws far more dangerous than the wimpy pole-bots inside the colony. Sass gulped. “Masks on!” she barked to Hugo. “Trapdoor open!”
“But the –”
She saw it. One of the drill-miners was currently rolled half-on the trapdoor. But everything would shuffle into that space in turn during their hold-wide jockeying for position. “NOW, Hugo!”
She grabbed him by the belt and flicked her gravity to 1g up, then jumped to the ceiling. But some of the nastier robotic arms could reach her standing form. She prudently dragged Hugo onto hands and knees to crawl. “Hold onto my belt. Do not let go of me!”
Carrying a grown man on a personal gravity generator really worked best if his center of gravity was clasped to hers. A fireman’s carry worked a treat. Trying to crawl while holding each other’s belts, not so much.
Hugo lagged and inched out of her field. Sass felt his weight shift and begin to fall to the pincers below. She yanked hard on his belt. He slumped sideways onto her crawling legs, and his belt loops broke.
“No good,” she decided. “I’m going to ride your back. You’ve got to keep moving. Get us above that airlock.”
She draped herself onto him, with her left arm hugging his thick waist. Hugo wasn’t exactly a powerhouse. She tried to keep most of her weight on her own knees, shuffling between his, but a third of her bulk rested on him.
On the bright side, she was much better positioned to goose him along. “Trapdoor, Hugo,” she reminded him.
“But – Fine! Computer, emergency override! Open inner and outer doors on the trapdoor airlock!”
The monster currently parked on the doors rocked and tilted. Unlike the outside doors, these didn’t open outward. Rather the door sections rotated and slid into the floor below. With a frantic whine, the robot’s lug wheels accelerated, trying to find purchase on the door edge. For a moment Sass though it might actually stay inside.
But no, it fell down through the hole. This was one of the bigger models, too, with three arms, all extended above its head. Problem o
ne, each of those arms ended in a different mining tool, all quite damaging to tender human flesh and pressure suit. Problem two, the damned thing was stuck blocking the hole, waving its instruments at them.
Sass scowled at it, and glanced to the other airlocks. If she used the door airlock, there was no way to keep several smaller but deadly bots from joining them. If she opened the cargo lock, they could all follow her out onto the spaceport pad like a monster parade. She – or rather Cupid – could invert the ship’s gravity, and the waving arms and tons of machinery below her would –
No, dumbass! “Hugo tell the computer to roll gravity to 0.9 g, direction 120 degrees up from centerline.”
Stumbling over the unfamiliar concepts a little, he relayed the instructions. Sass rammed an unapologetic knee up between his legs to hold onto him as she reset her grav generator to counter the ship’s field. In her haste, she guessed wrong, and they rolled ‘down’ the ceiling aft, as the heavy machinery fell forward to the overhead. One of the smaller devices came flying at them. Sass grabbed Hugo’s waist with both arms and rolled, wrestling him on top of her as the device sailed past.
And with all that excitement, the big driller was still stuck in the trapdoor. Because of course it is. The angle she’d chosen wouldn’t let it fall upward. The other robots clanked and crawled as Shiva struggled to right the disorderly pile.
Sass considered what new angle of gravity might work to clear the trapdoor. Then she thunked her helmet on Hugo’s. “I’m an idiot.”
The floor was open beneath them. The door-shaped airlock was free of all machinery. She considered explaining what she was about to do to her dance partner. But even her computer instructions turned out clear as mud. Some things were just hard to explain.
“Hold on to my waist!” she directed Hugo. He seized her, and she used both hands to perform a gravity slide, down the ceiling, down the wall. She punched the open button while they lay next to it, presently head-down. Rather than explain how to flip, she slid them into the airlock, closed the door behind them, and repeated the gravity slide until their feet were beneath them. Then she opened the outer door, and cut her grav as they hopped down to the ground at Sanctuary’s native 0.4 g.