Spaceship Thrive (Thrive Space Colony Adventures Book 2)

by Ginger Booth

  All of this back story Shauntay supplied at tedious length during journal entries focused on the soap opera minutiae of scientific backstabbing and bed-hopping. Suffice it to say that Shauntay was miffed that her superiors did not recognize her genius.

  Sass supposed that she must have volunteered for the Colony Corps to help save Earth. But the woman never mentioned her motivation. She supplied plenty of details on her menage with another nanite engineer whom even she conceded was more brilliant than herself, and a woman from the deck crew they agreed had fine tits and no brain.

  Sass figured the second woman likely also possessed the patience of a saint to put up with the egos of the other pair. Occasionally she jotted a note on her pocket comm. Now and then the Thrive fired a thruster to adjust their heading, and Sass checked that all remained well. They hurtled through space. No iron rocks hurled back. Life was good.

  The sexual shenanigans detailed surprised Sass not at all. She’d spent years on the Vitality colony ship, after all, breaking up the fights that cropped up as an inevitable side effect of bored healthy young adults screwing like bunnies. Clay intervened on one of her own breakup fights, come to think of it.

  Shauntay’s male lover was unfaithful to his pair of paramours. Sass got the impression of a cold and clinical man, Belker, not overly amused with Shauntay’s manic swings. Now and then the diarist dropped a hint of his work. Yes, Belker was a true genius, which riveted Sass’s attention and made her want to swat Shauntay up the head. Shauntay was smart, certainly, but a technician in Belker’s entourage. Shauntay was not in his league, if Sass read this right.

  And whoever devised the nanites that flowed through Sass’s veins, and lodged in her spine and brain for all she knew – he concocted that devilish syringe on the way to Earth from Ganymede on the Vitality. She hoped.

  “He’s a monster!” Shauntay wailed. Sass took a blasé chomp of her peach and rolled her eyes. She expected another glimpse of Belker looking at that nurse with nice hips right in front of Shauntay – the cad!

  But no. “I can’t believe he wants to test this on settlers. Not even warn them!” Bingo! Sass sat up straight. “Not even volunteers!” Shauntay was in tears. She did that a lot, cry on her diary.

  “Dr. Punjah forbid him to even ask the Ganymede crew. There’s so much untested tech here. And it takes over – God, the brain. It could rewrite someone’s moral code. Their bodies controlled by an A.I. whose only imperative is to preserve the life of the host. What kind of monster might that create?”

  What kind of monster indeed, Sass reflected. Tom, Sandman, Clay, herself. Sandman was kind of an ass, and Clay was a cold fish. But she was pretty sure that was already true before they received the nanite injection. She never noticed her own personality changed. Well, not a lot, anyway.

  She jotted down, Dr. Punjah boss.

  Shauntay’s penchant for melodrama cut off that line of reflection. “The fabricator nanites will do anything to survive. In vitro, their ability to replicate workers is stunning. Millions, billions, churned out like bacteria. And every one of them a distributed processor. Any quarter million of them can recreate the original fabricator if they lose contact with their creator. They’re impossible to kill. That would make the host nearly immortal. But they can’t be turned off!”

  An alarm went off. Sass jogged the Thrive ever so slightly to avoid a stray bit of iron the size of a walnut detected 10,000 kilometers away. She carefully checked their trajectory, and tested the guns. She told her thumping heart to calm down, and settled back to Shauntay.

  The woman’s next three journal entries were personal in nature. Then, “We did it. The nanites are ready. We’re on a legitimate vaccination team. We’re just using a different syringe for ten of them, that’s all.” Her voice was flat, deadened. Resigned to a path she didn’t agree with, yet driven by loyalty to this Belker? Perhaps.

  “God have mercy on our souls. What does that even mean?”

  Sass checked the time stamp, and noted the entry. Yes, that was the day before her immortality began, and four others of the ten were injected with death.

  “He dumped me,” Shauntay’s next entry began, three weeks later. Sass wasn’t surprised at the time lapse. The settler embarkation was hectic for everyone. “Off his team. Out of his quarters. Some of the test subjects died. I should feel bad about that, I guess. But I can’t stop thinking of him. What am I going to do?”

  She went on to describe her new assignment, which sounded like a lateral demotion. Sass listened to six more entries from the depressed engineer without further mention of Belker or the ‘test subjects.’ Could they really have isolated her so much from her previous team that she didn’t follow the fallout? Didn’t care?

  Sass doubted that. Shauntay was a smart woman, if a touch self-absorbed.

  “I met one,” a new entry began. “A test subject.”

  Sass checked the stamp. This was 7 weeks after the injection. They’d left Earth by then, headed perpendicular to the ecliptic for a year and a half before warp to the Alohan system. Life aboard had far from settled into a routine by then. But the settler medical staff was trained and busily inducing comas, laying out settlers on their shallow shelves in cold storage. Clay’s team, Sass among them, worked their tails off at that point, with most of a quarter million souls not yet in hibernation. The Ganymedes liked to call it ‘cryogenics,’ but the truth was substantially lower tech. The Vitality was built on a shoestring budget in a tearing hurry.

  “I didn’t dare ask anything. A 40% failure rate on the injection. But this one was successful. Apparent age decrease of 20 years. The guy was movie-star handsome before in middle age. Now he’s an absolute hunk.”

  Clay, Sass concluded wryly. The rest of them returned to perfect physical specimens of apparent age 20-25, and their vitality and muscle was undeniably attractive. Only Clay was drop-dead gorgeous, however.

  Shauntay went on to describe his physical stats in the most clinically detached terms. She must have been called in on a consult by the attending physician due to the nanites. Which she didn’t confess to knowing anything about.

  “Libido,” Shauntay snorted. “Belker set the nanites to restore libido even higher than normal for a 20-year-old male. Swine.”

  That was it. Sass listened to four more entries, and then the journal ended. She checked Shauntay’s personnel records. The woman eventually returned to Ganymede, as far as Sass could tell. But she stopped keeping a diary.

  “Clay, Sass,” she spoke to her intercom. “Come to the bridge? I found clues. And mention of you.”

  “Whatcha got?” Clay asked eagerly, slipping into the gunner’s seat beside her.

  He’d rushed. He already pulled off his fake crow’s feet for bed, washed off the subtle lines he drew to frame his mouth and between his brows. Sass did the same, a trick learned from him. Clay looked little older than Benjy, even eager at the moment.

  “Belker, is our nano-mage,” Sass began. “Our correspondent is Shauntay. They reported through a Dr. Punjah. Punjah knew about the proposal, but forbid experiments. Want to hear the raw?”

  “Absolutely,” Clay agreed.

  Sass played the snippets of interest, filling in personalities and relationships around the edges. During Shauntay’s discussion of his libido and musculature she tactfully let him listen without comment.

  “I’m not a profiler –” she began.

  Clay grinned. “But you’ll do it anyway.”

  “This Belker is a sociopath –”

  “Anti-social personality disorder. Or was there something I missed?”

  She shrugged. “He’s detached. Shauntay is concerned about what they did to us. He wasn’t.”

  Clay waved a hand so-so. “She didn’t say how he reacted to the deaths.”

  “Oh, she’s utterly self-absorbed,” Sass agreed. “Not uncommon.”

  Clay snorted agreement.

  “I looked in the personnel files. She was on the technology transfer team for Mahina A
ctual. The Gannies weren’t supposed to share their nanite tech with the locals. But MA was light years ahead of them on generating babies. I hadn’t realized that before. All the Gannies were born on Earth. So they broke the rules and swapped tech advances to free themselves of Earth for procreation.”

  “Not a bad trade,” Clay allowed. “Search for Belker yet?”

  Sass grinned. “Waited for you.”

  Another alarm went off, horrifically loud. Clay hastily evacuated his chair. Sass slid in and hit the guns for a dozen shots.

  “Does that happen a lot?” Clay asked in dismay, as she shifted back to the pilot seat.

  “A few times a shift. Four hour watches.”

  “Wouldn’t 8 hours be better? Get it over with?”

  Sass shook her head. “Hard to pay attention for 8 hours. Too dull. Belker?”

  “Belker!” he agreed in glee. He used his pocket comm for input, but showed the results of his searches on a display below the armored windows. Far better at data than Sass, his successive database queries flew by on the screen.

  He used spelling after spelling, and came up empty. “No Belker. He’s a ghost.” Clay sat back in the gunner’s seat. “Is that even possible?”

  “Search on Shauntay and Punjah?” Sass suggested.

  “Already did. They existed in the records. Not Belker.”

  “Who did Shauntay report to?”

  With effort, Clay found a performance review dated about halfway to Earth from Ganymede. “Supervisor field is blank. Check this out – Mr. Blank says she’s delusional. Wants her transferred out of his section.”

  “But a Dr. Punjah signed off on the review,” Sass noted. “Search on that?”

  “Excellent thought,” Clay purred. “Punjah was a bigwig, signed off on twenty-odd reviews. Not seeing a Belker.”

  “Blank,” Sass noted. “First one has no name.”

  “How did I miss that,” Clay murmured, opening the file. “Bingo, direct report to Punjah. ‘One of the true geniuses of our time.’ ‘Stunning breakthroughs in longevity research.’” He paused to make a note of the terminology, ‘longevity research.’

  “Says Belker’s record-keeping was impeccable,” Sass noted. “Assuming blank is Belker.”

  Clay sighed. “No slouch at covering his tracks, either.”

  “Did he?” Sass asked. “Or did Punjah? Looks to me like Punjah was top dog on medical nanites. The Ganny crew wasn’t that big. I’m surprised they had this many people.”

  Clay nodded. “You’re right. Either of them could have excised the database. Punjah had everything to lose. He knew what Belker did to us. Maybe not ahead of time. But afterward surely.”

  Sass furrowed her brow. “Do we know who left? They rendezvoused at Sagamore Orbital, right?”

  The Vitality stayed in Mahina Orbit, gradually cannibalized for parts as its refugees transferred to the surface. Sagamore had a more sophisticated metals and machine operation. The Gannies built their getaway spaceship there, at least from Pono space. Sass never heard whether the Denali contingent rendezvoused with them, or left separately from the rock ball planet in-system from Pono. They might have even stayed on Denali for all she knew.

  Clay tried searching for that answer several ways. But the fact remained – the Gannies didn’t depart from Mahina Orbital. “Guess I’ll find out at SO.” He made a note of the question.

  “Oh, well,” said Sass. “Sorry not as useful a clue as I hoped.”

  Clay shook his head. “That was huge. I’ll hammer at this some more. Extend the TO on your wall.” He smiled. “And it’s a little early, but – Happy hundredth birthday, Sass.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek.

  23

  Ganymede’s official policy was not to share technology with the colonies at all. They were especially secretive about where the Colony Corps went after delivering their settlers.

  Abel knocked briefly at Sass’s cabin door, then hung his head in with a grin. “It’s time, birthday girl! You look fantastic. Not a day over 20.”

  Sass finished affixing an earring. She’d been under house arrest for the past hour while Jules completed the grand dinner party preparations. The captain used the time to pamper herself and dress up for a change. Even her fingernails were clean and manicured. The stick-on crow’s feet and smile lines could stay in her cosmetic box for tonight.

  She would attend as herself. What an odd feeling.

  “Why aren’t you on the bridge?” Part of herself was the captain, after all.

  “Benjy’s spelling me for an hour,” Abel replied, backing out of the cabin for her to emerge. “You don’t work tonight.”

  “Did I agree to this?”

  “First mate makes the schedule,” he said, taking her elbow. “Don’t worry. The worst of it is a 5-hour mid-watch for Benjy instead of 4. I quite enjoy my split shift.”

  Sass beamed and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for the evening off, Abel.”

  “No sweat. Remember to act surprised.”

  Sass snickered. They reached the galley, only a few meters along the catwalk from her cabin. She didn’t need to act surprised at all. She laughed out loud.

  Jules had reeled in all of her satellite planters, and some from the engine room garden as well, to festoon the room with flowers. Twisted garlands hung from the overhead like the spines of an umbrella. Popular settler honky-tonk music played.

  The table was set in all its glory, using their best plates and all the cutlery. Someone must have spent hours with the ice wand forming the ice sculpture centerpiece, a gleaming glass-like model of the Thrive in its very own drip basin of foamcrete. The salad bowl was enormous, made of Sass’s own vegetables. Fresh-baked bread smelled divine. Tantalizing aromas promised more delights for later courses.

  Everyone dressed up for the occasion, just as she had. They stood behind their chairs, beaming.

  “On three! One, two, three,” Jules called out.

  “Happy hundredth birthday, Sass Collier!” the gang called out in unison, including Abel at her elbow.

  Sass laughed out loud and clapped. “Gorgeous! Jules, this is fantastic.” She waded in and kissed the 15-year-old on the check, and received a bear hug in return. Sass whispered in her ear. “Truly impressed, Jules. Thank you so much for the lovely party.”

  Jules practically glowed with pleasure and pride, as her husband dove in for a congratulatory hug as well. That almost did Sass’s heart more good than the decorations. The girl was getting past her scare on MO.

  Sass went on to exchange hugs and a few words with everyone else present, sharing a few personal words with each of them. She didn’t notice anyone was missing until half had already drifted to their chairs for supper.

  “Where’s Clay?” she asked.

  Jules replied, “He said this was your birthday party, captain. I guess he didn’t like the idea of sharing it.”

  Sass dismissed the silly notion with a toss of her head. “OK, someone needs to go fetch Clay. Who’s closest friends with him?”

  Silence greeted this question. A few among the crew glanced at each other.

  Eli spoke up. “Failed premise, Sass. You’re closest to Clay. You’re the one he won’t refuse.”

  Her smile faded. She gave him a sharp nod. “Thanks, Eli. Be right back!”

  Once on the catwalk, she decided to call ahead on intercom. “Clay? Where are you?”

  He opened his cabin door rather than use the comms. “Happy birthday.”

  She walked over and seized his arm. “Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Just come to my party.”

  “Sass –”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Not now. Tell me later. And unless you’ve celebrated your 105th birthday – by number count – we will raise a toast for you, too. And you will enjoy it. Captain’s orders.”

  He allowed himself to be pulled. “Enjoying the party is optional.”

  “You will act like you enjoy it. Fake it until you make it.”

  She was pleased to see that c
aught him in the sense of humor. Before they crossed into view from the galley, she pulled him up short, and draped her arms around his neck for a quick kiss. “Happy 105th birthday, Clay. And many happy returns.”

  That actually won a smile. And a return kiss. “You grow more attractive each year, young lady.”

  Sass laughed out loud and dragged him into the galley. “On three. One, two, three –”

  “Happy one hundred fifth birthday, Clay Rocha!” the crew chorused, at ear-splitting volume, followed by applause and hoots. The booze was flowing by now on empty stomachs.

  Jules offered another bear hug. Griffith and Wilder pounded the table. “Eat, eat, eat!”

  Clay dropped to his seat at the foot of the table with alacrity. Jules and Sass raced to their chairs, Sass at the head, Jules on the far side of Abel from Sass’s right hand.

  “A toast!” Abel proclaimed. Several grabbed for pitchers lest they be caught with an empty goblet. “My business partners have seen a century,” he nodded to Sass, then Clay, “and the same plus 5 years more. You’ve known Earth and Mahina, and the cold of space between. You’ve guided Mahina’s settlers, and sometimes paid the price. You’ve apprehended many crooks, made friends and families, and seen them pass. You’ve probably forgotten more than any of us ever knew. You’ve grown in wisdom. Other friends are gone. But hey, you’ve got us. To Sass and Clay! Happy birthday!”

  “To Sass and Clay! Happy birthday!” the crew chorused.

  Sass leaned forward to address Griffith and Wilder, down toward Clay’s end of the table. “And to quote two wise guys, let’s eat!” The gang greeted that with cheers, too.

  Sass leaned toward Abel. “Great speech. Is it my imagination, or are you getting better at that stuff, number one?”