by Ginger Booth
Kassidy hopped down to reply, with catlike ease. They didn’t dare speak loud enough to be heard outside their ‘room.’ “Some traffic, no guards. Which way are we going?”
Sass contemplated the dome above. The strangely small chip of Pono, barely brighter at Sagamore’s distance than the Moon back on Earth, hung in the sky on the far side of the domes from where the skyships parked.
“That way.” Sass pointed, and held her arm until Jules also stole a glance. The teen dropped down, far less gracefully. “Across the dome, I think.”
“We’re a third of the way in from that side of the dome,” Kassidy reported, who had watched that way.
She meant this particular dome. A whole clump of the girder-and-glass structures clustered at Dome. Sass was pretty sure it was the next dome over that they trashed when the Thrive blew up its assigned gun tower. She hoped so anyway. If not, they were farther from skyships than she hoped. But no, the horizontal distances traveled had been moderate, no more than a kilometer.
“Anyone armed nearby? Line of sight?” Sass asked.
Jules whispered, “I only saw slaves working on my side.” She’d broken into hysterics again at the gruesome sight of three dead bodies in the audience hall. The girl had spoken to Martin every day lately. The guns blew out his chest right in front of her, killing him instantly. Now Jules looked shocky, and her hands shook. But she wasn’t screeching any more, which Sass counted a mercy.
“Good job, Jules,” Sass pressed her hand and tried to will calm into her charge with a smile. Then she turned to hop to the 3-meter top of the wall that housed the sole door into their pen. Good thing they’d kept their voices low – an armed guard waited outside their door, leaning on the wall. Occasionally he glanced along the corridor.
Sagamores thought in 2D, floor plans, not cubic. Sass loved that about them. She hung on long enough to see that no more armed forces were on their way right this moment. Best to seize the window of opportunity right away, then. She dropped back to the floor, knees flexing to keep the landing silent. She paused, and crouched again by Lavelle. He’d be heavy. But if she brought him along, she could always drop him later if the burden was too great.
In decision, she heaved him up in a fireman’s carry. She stepped to the far dividing wall from the door and beckoned the girls to join her.
“Because you slept with him?” Kassidy’s skeptical brow and sneer made clear her preference – ditch the pirate.
38
Earth’s 1 g was standard on Mahina. Many other colonies adopted 0.9 g as a power saving measure that seemed to do little harm.
Something pressed against his face. A cold hissing flow blew at his nose. He struggled to rouse and tear the thing away with arms that felt like lead.
“Hush, Clay, don’t struggle!” a semi-familiar voice urged. “It’s just oxygen. Damn, you are alive!”
Clay sighed deeply. Yeah, somehow that keeps happening to me. Much as he didn’t want to, he slitted his eyes open. With a few blinks, his gummy view cleared enough to see Eli hanging over him in concern. His sluggish brain recognized the man after a few seconds, and the walls of the hold. The Thrive. “Woppen?” He swallowed and tried again. “Wha hoppen?” The effort made him dizzy.
“Never mind about that. I thought you were dead! Hang on, I’ll get a grav carrier.”
“No. Mm-ok.” Just seriously groggy. He finally managed to bat the annoying face mask off, and breathed deep. “Tell me.”
“Clay, you’re not OK! The guard blew a hole through your chest!”
“Heart beat,” Clay argued. “Breathe. What happened after?”
That brought Eli up short. He pulled burnt shirt away from his patient’s chest. Sheets of dead skin peeled away with it to reveal fresh pink skin, perfectly healthy. “I’ll be damned. That’s amazing.”
Clay wished he had a million credits for each time he’d gone through this conversation. Or did he? Yeah, he probably did have that much. Compound interest was a wonder. Got to focus. “Tell me.”
Persuaded that Clay wasn’t at death’s door just this moment, Eli brought him up to speed – everyone taken prisoner, except the dead body and Eli as garden caretaker, busy crafting their gift of new crops for Hell’s Bells. The remote-controlled skyship had hopped to a new parking space. And no one bothered to keep Eli apprised of plans.
“Sorry I didn’t check on you sooner,” he ended. “I mean, we all thought you were dead.”
“Prolly was,” Clay agreed. “Prob-a-bly.” He sighed deeply. Coming back to life sucked. Bad enough that he felt like hell. There was always some situation that rendered him dead in the first place, and still needed solving. He allowed himself one massive yawn. Then he decided he’d been selfish long enough with the napping.
His life was in no danger. But there were others. There always were.
“Help me up.”
“To the auto-doc.”
“Maybe.” That concession convinced Eli to do as he asked. Once he was sitting upright, his body got the hint, wake up now, and started cooperating. The fog began to part.
He had plans for this eventuality. What were those again? Oh, yeah. He tried to pull his comms tablet out of his pocket. Eli accomplished that for him, but the device was fried, shattered on the display and melted at the corner. His pants disintegrated.
“I’ll get you a hospital robe.”
“Never mind that. Bring me to my room.” He had one-button access to his countermeasures set up on the dead pocket tablet. But he could initiate them from his computer. He patted his middle. Of course the grav generator was fried, too. He tossed it away, then yanked on Eli to lever himself up to his feet.
He swayed. He swallowed. He stared at a blackened blast spot on the wall until the deck stopped tilting so dizzily. “Ready. Up. On grav.”
“Clay, you really ought to be in the auto-doc –”
“Eli? What can the auto-doc do, that I didn’t already do better myself? No auto-doc.”
Eli considered that, then nodded sheepishly. The least athletic member of the Thrive family, he nevertheless managed to provide an awkward elevator ride to the top of the stairs with his gravity generator. He made a creditable crutch walking Clay back to his room. He even made a half-decent nurse peeling Clay out of burnt clothes and dead skin, especially gruesome around the groin.
Clay tried to ignore his ministrations. He opened his collection of the macros he and Ben and Copeland so lovingly crafted over the past week, and contemplated his options. He wouldn’t use Copeland’s nuclear option to power off all receivers yet. Comms might be useful. He could take remote control of the Gossamer, but even running the Thrive was more than he and Eli could manage. He’d keep it simple to start.
He ran the macro that restored all systems to local control, and enabled the ESD field for defense.
Great. He was now the only crew of a spaceship, with a botanist assisting. Well, after an 80 year career in law enforcement, he wanted to try new things in retirement.
Getting shot in the line of duty isn’t new.
“Now we wait,” Clay announced. “Hopefully somebody comes back who knows how to fly this thing.”
“And if they don’t?” Eli asked.
Good question.
“No,” Sass instantly denied. She winced as her voice came out louder than she would have liked. Besides, she had to concede the point. “Though sleeping with a guy does tend to color my judgment. But that’s not why we’re keeping Lavelle.”
“Always screws up my judgment,” Kassidy hissed. “He’s too heavy.”
Sass pursed her lips and pointed up. She pulled them all heads together for a whispering huddle. “Jules, be careful here. Use super-low gravity. It’s an acceleration. Just a quick drip of gravity, minus 1.2 g, no more than a second or two, then cut to minus 0.95 max. The grav plates here are around 0.9 g. You need to cancel that, then drift toward the ceiling at about the speed of a slow walk. Are you picturing this?”
The girl never did real
EVA outside the ship, only the game in the cargo hold. Sass doubted she’d ever studied physics, or even enough math to be comfortable with negative numbers. Kids played with their gravity generators all the time. But Mahina parents were especially strident on the lesson to never use grav manipulations to travel, or they’d lock the controls for a year for the kid to wise up. Having a locked generator was quite an embarrassment on the playground.
Now Jules frowned fearfully at the dome. “We’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Only if they see us,” Sass whispered back. “Will they see us, Jules?”
Put that way, Jules studied the murky recesses again, soaring over 50 meters above them. Probably no one looked up. There was little to see, and frankly Sagamore tunnel-dwellers were afraid of their hostile sky. “We walk the girders,” she murmured. “Got it.”
“Want me to control your grav for you, Jules?” Kassidy offered.
Sass couldn’t. She needed to manage Lavelle’s dead weight.
But Jules shook her head, face set in resolve. “I can do it.”
“I’ll go first,” Kassidy breathed. “I’ll start at minus 1.2 g. If I go too fast, you try 1.1, right?”
“Got it.” The teen gulped, but nodded.
With that, Kassidy rose, gathered a little momentum, then zeroed out her grav almost instantly, as per plan. She shifted to fly upward spreadeagled for the view below.
“Don’t copy that part,” Sass critiqued to Jules. “Spin is hard to control.” The girl knew that much from games in the hold. Sass trusted this was only a reminder. She could go all the way to the roof with her head pointing up, and wait to pivot to get her feet under her at the end.
Sass waited until Kassidy landed with flawless grace, and instantly disappeared into the dark of a girder. She hoped that gave Jules confidence.
“Go,” Sass urged. Jules hesitated for another nervous swallow, then suddenly fell upward. Sass waited only a second behind her, and followed her falling toward the dome.
She sure hoped Kassidy was watching Jules, because this was a hell of a maneuver with Pierre on her shoulder. Unlike the advice she gave the teen, Sass started a pivot the instant she nulled out her gravity. With the mass for two and a half of herself, against plenty of air pressure, her angular momentum slowed nicely. She landed too hard on the glass, and twisted her ankle. But that was nothing. She flexed and rotated the abused ankle, and tweaked her gravity to an apparent 1/3 g dome-ward to give it a break and lighten Lavelle. Only then did she step onto the girder alongside the girls.
“All good?”
“Jules is limping,” Kassidy reported. “Maybe broke a long bone in her foot.”
“I’m fine!” Jules retorted. “I just limp a little.”
“Me, too. Got my ankle. Jules? Reset your gravity to lessen the strain on your foot.”
“No!” Jules gave the knee-jerk response, born of the terror of turning into a weak stretched lanky sort of settler. She’d married at 15 to avoid such a fate.
Sass could see the doubts flash across her open freckled face, brow crumpled in the murk. “It’s OK, Jules. Our lives are at stake.”
Tears stood in her eyes, but Jules complied. She’d be bounding along the girders now.
“OK, now. Watch the curvature, we’ll be angling down to wall-walking. And we need to go to ground and through a door at some point. Stop where we can still watch and talk. Bottlenecks will have traffic. Kassidy, take point. I’ll be right behind you, Jules. Go.”
And they set off along the girders of the geodesic dome, baby spiders scurrying across the web of a truly monstrous mama spider.
Sass forced herself not to peer below into the sorry lives of the Sagamore slaves, like a voyeur into suffering and hopelessness. She couldn’t help them now.
39
Technologies born of Sagamore include posarium-based pharmaceuticals, advanced aquaponic agriculture, and many of the pressure leak control measures we take for granted these days.
Copeland’s eyes followed Ben’s pointing finger, then he stepped closer because some broken dome girders were in the way. From this point, across the bubble from where they began, they could dimly see outside the domes.
Both skyships were parked only a few hundred meters away, from each other as well as from them.
“Which one is Thrive?” Ben asked.
Abel growled, “Hit him.”
Copeland mock-slapped his room-mate upside the head. He pointed to the left. “That one. You know, if you’re the driver, you really ought to know what your vehicle looks like.”
“Or get lost in the parking lot,” Abel grumbled, joining them. “What do you think, John?”
Copeland studied the intervening floor in misgiving. “Look for guards,” he told the other two. Abel set off to circumnavigate their balloon again. Copeland crouched to examine the bubble-floor interface. He cut himself another patch of duct tape, then scraped cautiously at the base of the bubble-wall with his thumbnail. “Ben, is there a spot where bubble meets wreckage on the floor? Go look.”
He had an idea. But that idea wouldn’t work unless his bubble kits would form a seal with the floor. The latex-alike seemed to form a simple adhesive bond with the rubber mat tile that formed the normal floor here. The wall happily dipped into the gutter, and stuck there to stone. No tackiness whatsoever on his fingers. The stuff didn’t stick to the plastic of the broom handle, or the scissors, which were metal.
And then there was air. He figured they could probably hold their breath and run for a couple minutes. He knew the Thrive’s airlock like the back of his hand – once he reached that, he’d have a lungful of air within seconds. But how to get there. He doubted any of them could run 300-400 meters fast enough without breathing. And anyone who fell behind would suffocate.
They had air here. It wasn’t very good air. He could blow up another bubble, but if it turned out the same size, the air would be half pressure. And he was already getting light-headed.
Unless… Experimentally, he pried up a floor tile, hacking at it with his broom-knife. The adhesive to the rock sub-flooring held way too strongly, but the 3-centimeter thick rubber peeled apart. Testing, he put it onto the bubble wall.
It stuck. Then he pulled. Yeah, that was a firm seal. Then he saw his square of duct tape and tried that. Yeah, dumbass, the duct tape sticks the wall fine without chipping up the floor! He then pounded himself in the forehead
“What’s wrong?” Abel asked, rejoining him.
“Nah, just being stupid. Got a plan. Not a great plan. Ben?”
The younger man rejoined them, and showed him an image taken on his pocket comm. “Is that what you wanted? The bubble wall maybe flows around metal until it finds something to stick to.”
Copeland frowned at the picture. He zoomed in to study it closely.
“You’ve got a plan,” Abel prompted.
“Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a good plan. Might just get us killed.” He tapped the phone image. “Thing is, we’ve got more bubble kits. Guards?”
“Nobody’s watching us that I can tell,” Abel confirmed. “Some of the mini-settlers are around.”
“Not worried about them,” Copeland confirmed. “Thing is, this bubble holds all our air. Idea is, we tack on another bubble, inflate it with this air, move on. Might take two or three bubbles to get close enough to run the rest of the way.”
“We screw up, we’ve got a lot farther to run,” Abel concluded. “Or lose the air we’ve got.” He scrubbed his face.
“Wait,” Benjy suggested. “We’ve got how many bubble-kits? Ten?”
“Yeah?”
“So we try one outside the bubble, without risking this one.”
“How do we get outside the bubble?” Abel objected.
“No wait, it’s a good idea,” Copeland said. “Except we try it inside. Move your carts back.”
They pulled back a few meters. Then Copeland set off a bubble toward them. The milky ball expanded rapidly and pushed him and his cart against
the wall behind him. It flowed and stuck to the wall and floor. On the far side, the sphere expanded only a meter beyond his companions. And stopped. As clear as the parent bubble, this pocket kit seemed to generate a bubble only about 3 meters in diameter.
This stuff is epic!
Then he realized he’d been sealed inside a very tiny pocket of air between bubbles, and hastily hacked his way through with his broom-knife.
Yeah, light-headed from lack of air. The fumes off the bubble-stuff were making him woozy, too.
Ben laughed out loud. “But if the patch kits are all this small, I don’t know how far we’ll get.”
“But we’ll have enough air,” Copeland countered. “That’s what I was worried about. OK, next step, take your duct tape. I want you to anchor a streamer of duct tape, high as you can reach on the wall. Like this.” He demonstrated, affixing about a meter of duct tape to the balloon-wall. Then he tugged on it to prove it would pull the wall toward him.
Abel crossed his arms. “OK. What good does that do us?”
“We use the air from this bubble to inflate the others,” Ben said. “Um, ready for me to cut my way out of this?”
“Yeah, I’m going to try to create our next chamber while you guys figure out how to collapse the bubble behind us.”
Following the instructions carefully from the side of the packet, Copeland unwrapped the next bubble-wad. A miniature sharpened plastic straw came with each kit. He stabbed the wall. Air started hissing out, but not very fast. Then working quickly, he activated the gum-ball of contracted bubble and poked it halfway through the pinhole – the hole expanded. Then he pulled the drawstring that set the bubble free. Again it quickly expanded, this time about 5 meters distant and 2 meters tall. It also tore open the side of the mother balloon and sucked its air to inflate itself.
“Whoa!” Benjy yelled behind him.
Copeland wasn’t the slightest bit tempted to look. “Hold, please hold,” he muttered, as he ducked into his new corridor. He was 2 meters tall himself, so he couldn’t quite stand upright. Which was fine for the moment, because he was desperately searching the floor for leaks.
