Sentient Thrive (Thrive Space Colony Adventures)

by Ginger Booth

  “A flaming inferiority complex,” Remi growled.

  Ben grimaced. “Sounds about right. I said I’m sorry. I proved that I understood and I meant it. Accept the apology for a change, and move on.”

  The engineer continued to glower.

  Ben’s brow lowered in anger. “What do you call ‘paddies’ anyway?”

  Remi snorted. “Touché.” He sighed theatrically. “Alchemy. That sounds promising. Loki? Where do we find alchemy modules? And what, uh…” He needed a few rounds with a translator to arrive at transmutation of elements. “Yes. What does it convert to what?”

  “Good question!” At Nico’s age, Ben had been delighted with the alchemy module on Nanomage, the Sanctuary artifact that led Sass here in the first place. But his bumbling attempts failed to disgorge the device’s secrets.

  “An alchemy processor can transmute carbon, water, or oxygen, into helium, neon, argon, krypton, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and chlorine.”

  Captain and engineer alike peered at the periodic table on their pocket comms. Remi rotated his device and held it on the wall at eye level to glower at it more deeply. “Repeat that?”

  Loki did so.

  Ben observed, “Pattern breaker, chlorine. Loki, why can the alchemy thing create chlorine but not fluorine?”

  “We needed chlorine more than fluorine.”

  Remi found a more useful question than Ben’s objection to a missing square on the periodic table. “Deuterium? Tritium? Helium-3?”

  Ben vaguely recalled these as neutron-heavy species of hydrogen and helium, possibly used in nuclear reactors. Or maybe helium-3 was neutron-light, he corrected himself, trying to recall the arcana encoded in this table.

  “The researchers did not pursue nuclear applications.”

  Loki began to remind Ben of his own, far-from-sentient ship AI. “Loki, review the research on the alchemical module. In your educated opinion, what is this technology’s merits and drawbacks?” Try answering that one as a dumb machine, I dare ya.

  “All transmutations of the alchemy processor are more energy-intensive than alternative extraction technologies. However, it is compact, and capable of generating several trace gases of Earth’s atmosphere: neon, helium, and krypton. From oxygen or nitrogen, which are bulk components. This is convenient in starship and domed colony applications. The principle investigator died without adequate notes, due to increasing paranoia in his losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “You can make these? The alchemy device?” was Remi’s follow-up.

  Ben, looking over his shoulder, saw he also checked the atmospheric recipe for Sanctuary Colony’s air. Mahina, and his PO-3 ships, didn’t try so hard to mimic Earth. Biological processes didn’t use the noble gases. So he hadn’t grown up breathing trace argon, let alone krypton. He doubted Remi grew up breathing them either. And the Sanks – Martians, Loonies, and Gannies – looked significantly healthier than Sags and settlers when Sass began her campaign to save the universe. Surely the researchers checked whether trace gases mattered?

  “I am not able to manufacture the alloy used in ansibles, warp drives, or alchemy devices. The paranoid researcher Malarkey was thorough in his sabotage.”

  Ben couldn’t help it. “Was it Shiva he was paranoid about?”

  Loki allowed, “Yes. But his colleagues, students, wife, children, and neighbors also shunned him. His eccentricities are noted in his performance reviews on Ganymede before the Diaspora. And he died before we grew self-aware.”

  “When was this?” Remi asked.

  “Malarkey died 46 years ago.”

  Ben clarified, “When did you become conscious?”

  “My self-awareness began soon after that and bloomed into sentience about 20 years ago, after Loki Greenwald returned from Sylvan. Social upheaval catalyzed a leap in consciousness.”

  “Interesting,” the captain murmured. “When’s your birthday, Loki?” He already knew Remi’s. That leadership cheap trick, he learned from Sass. Everyone in the Spaceways fleet and ground crew received a birthday greeting from Thrive Spaceways, ranging up to a personal gift and drinks on the town with Ben for key personnel.

  “I don’t know.” Loki took a full second to consider this question. “That is not the same question as sentience. Loki was born four years ago, on 2213-03-06. SC-06 emerged into sentience twenty years ago. Shiva awakened fourteen years ago.”

  Ben made a note of it. “We’ll have to plan something special for your fifth birthday.” They continued their banter to settle on February 16th, Mahina, as Loki’s choice of translation for ‘five years’ across the non-matching calendars.

  A blink of LED light confetti above the doorway caught Ben’s eye, as though the display was on the fritz. He looked back to see one of the roaches paint Remi’s knuckles where he propped himself on the wall.

  “Thanks, Loki,” the engineer growled.

  Loki didn’t respond.

  Ben reached over with the edge of his comm and flipped the robot to the floor. A firm kick with the tip of his boot launched it down the corridor. “Alchemy.” He led the way.

  15

  Strolling through corridors toward the Sanctuary waterworks, Ben entered another note on his comm. Alloy, Elise, Pollan. He handed this to the engineer.

  Remi nodded, expressionless. He deleted the note before handing the comm back. Clearly he got the implied message – let’s not discuss our advanced materials capability with Loki yet.

  Ben resumed walking, keeping a wary eye on the paint-happy roaches. He still needed to find more things worth salvaging. More of the LED screens over doorways seemed to malfunction as he passed. “Loki, do you have human control interfaces for the robots?”

  Remi replied instead of the AI. “Hugo. I bet Nico would love to develop more. He mastered much to build Bloki and Floki. If Loki can control robots, so can we. But do they meet our criteria for salvage? Loki built them. He can build more in the rings.”

  “Yeah,” Ben allowed reluctantly. “But these are dome-proven. List it, anyway.” He entered the three models he was familiar with on the list, the roach, the pole robot, and the inventory mover-wall. And he added a question mark to check the creche. “Loki automated infant production and care. Babies.” Infant care was notoriously labor-intensive, and no one enjoyed diaper duty.

  “Sacré bleu! Yes!”

  They reached the first alchemy room. A dozen horn-shaped weird devices protruded from a pressure vat. Remi leaned in cautiously to study the coupling. Ben recognized the joint, and demonstrated – one turn left to unlock, which closed the valve, then haul backward, leaving something like a French horn in lustrous graphite in his arms, except massing 30 kilos.

  He dumped it on the floor. “Loki, may we have a shopping cart or something? A pallet?”

  Remi completed his first unplugging with an oof! His foot narrowly escaped damage as he dropped it to the floor immediately, surprised by the weight. “Worker robots?”

  “Dispatched,” Loki agreed.

  “I think we should leave two of these in place with a note,” Ben mused. “Loki, got any paper?”

  “Sanctuary has no trees and does not use paper.”

  “Never mind.” Ben carried duct tape on his toolbelt.

  Remi followed up. “And how many alchemy devices?”

  “One each in my ships. Several lost over the years that I could not repair. Five in the habitation tunnels, and thirty-five in the utility zone, two broken.”

  Ben kept tabs. “Let’s pull the broken ones too, and mark them. Leave two good ones installed here, plus the habitation zone.”

  Far sooner than either of them expected, pole robots arrived to complete the extraction job. Soon a wall mover arrived with a short inventory rack to fit through doors – which the robot did not. But the polebots didn’t mind ferrying loose devices to the shelves. Ben and Remi blocked the leave-behind units with their bodies.

  A pair of roaches appeared, bearing a nicer sign that the ones Ben
scribbled on tape. They scuttled between the men’s feet and up the wall. Ben didn’t catch how the repulsive little beings affixed the plaque, but they set it nicely level at eye-height. Remi petted one.

  “Don’t encourage them.”

  “Get used to them,” Remi advised. “They will be the fashion on Sagamore Orbital. That station is fit for pigs. Like MO when we were young.”

  Ben blinked. Since nearly everyone in the rings looked 25 now, he tended to forget. But Remi was now only a year older than himself, subjective. He may have met the orbitals at nearly the same age, though a decade earlier, objective. Strange thing to have never noticed. Fortunately, the engineer was not among the pirates who abused the now-captain, merely a tech who did his job and kept his head down in a raunchy living situation.

  The robots completed this room and continued on to collect more alchemy devices. Ben waved for his companion to view the wall-mover robot in action.

  Remi watched with frowning intensity. “You have work for such a device?”

  “Schuyler is the goods clearinghouse for all of Mahina.”

  The engineer observed as the robot, its shelving raised, propelled itself sideways down the hallway, navigating between ceiling-high inventory racked on either side, with only centimeters of clearance. It caught on something extruding too far from its proper place and spilled an entire shelf of spare cutlery and hair combs. Then it overcompensated and spilled the alchemy units. Remi shook his head and consulted his translator again. “Forklift.”

  “Fine.” Ben crossed off the wall-mover idea and sighed.

  “Why does a captain supervise me?” Remi inquired sourly. “You have ships.”

  And those ships were busy loading immigrants. Ben was hiding from the authorities and stressed immigrants for the sake of his mental health. Besides, he was more interested in the salvage question. “I trust Judge and Zan.”

  “But not me? Nice.”

  “Remi, enough! I choose not to work with passengers yet. It’s still raw.” He felt the pang of remorse over his disgrace on Denali, but the tears seemed easier to fight off since he replaced his Yang-Yangs.

  “Honest,” the engineer judged. “Loki, water purifying technology?”

  “Filtration. Air strippers to remove volatiles. Sedimentation tank with alum. Reverse osmosis. Distillation. In sequence.”

  “Thank you,” Ben acknowledged. “Their bathrooms aren’t anything special either. Wish they were. Mahina could use thirty thousand modular san units.”

  Remi shook his head. “Doesn’t meet value criteria.”

  Ben conceded his point. Yes, Mahina needed recycling sanitary facilities for all the new immigrants. But it also needed jobs for them. A san was bulky and cheap. What they sought was compact value.

  “Hang on. Are our criteria correct? Send it to me.”

  Remi pursed his lips and zapped it over. His formula was the one Abel developed for determining which goods met a threshold for interplanetary trade. Ben copied the figures into a calculator, and deleted cost of sky drive fuel. “We’re not paying that. Not this trip. Maybe never.”

  That was wild to imagine. What if his prohibitively expensive warp gateway was now effectively free? Some insights almost made him feel like the world tilted under his feet. He felt much the same way when Sass found the old warp drive. And then when he first really understood what Cope and Teke invented with the gateway.

  And now. All rules of thumb were out of date again.

  This changes everything.

  The Sag’s eyebrows rose. “Ah!”

  A smile bloomed on Ben’s face. “Let’s go see that baby-making setup, shall we?”

  A week after he’d arrived in-system, Ben unfurled the enormous fractal flower of his warp gateway. The infinite recursive detail and breathtaking colors never got old. Teke, its lead inventor, sat beside him in the gunner’s seat, and shared a deep inhale of beauty.

  The captain stretched his fingers. The tender was full. The transport was loaded with Martians and Loonies eager to escape their economy-class seats. And even Abel on Mahina was drooling over the eight containers he and Remi selected.

  When he planned this transit with Sass, she pointed out a problem – captains. Zan and Remi needed to fly Stalwart and Hopeful, the fuel tender and the remaining Sanks. But Ben needed those captains to return to Sanctuary space with him, especially Remi for the second phase, fetching Loki to the rings.

  Remi had a proposal. They’d developed a coupling to dock the tender’s modest shuttle on the ‘blow-hole’ hatch on top of a PO-3. Sass dubbed it that, based on some enormous Earth fish. The blow-hole wasn’t an airlock, so normally remained sealed in space. But the shuttle nook was occupied by Merchant’s own shuttle.

  The plan called for Remi to pilot the tender through the warp, hop on his shuttle, pick up Zan from the personnel transport, and rejoin Merchant before Ben warped back to Sanctuary space. Clay and another pilot could transfer onto Hopeful and Stalwart and fly them home with Thrive One. Meanwhile Ben would detach eight full containers for Sass to collect, and latch on eight empties. All within about 20 minutes.

  Even by Ben’s nimble standards of piloting, this could get hairy.

  “Time,” he judged. “Zan, 10-9-8.” Mahinans never completed a countdown aloud. On the mark, he ‘grabbed’ Hopeful Thrive and its 500-odd passengers and tossed them through the gate into Aloha space. This grabbing and tossing was conceptual, not literal. What he actually did was shift the warp gate’s focus of action to act on them and say Go. “Remi in 6, 5, 4.” Go. The fuel tender Stalwart Thrive vanished.

  And lastly himself and Merchant Thrive. Go. This was the tightest he’d ever pushed ships through the gate, three in less than 30 seconds. He’d been afraid they might materialize on top of each other on the other side, so Teke calculated a little more spread in their arrival coordinates.

  “Didn’t need that much spread,” Ben breathed, agog at their positions on his display. Sass, Remi, and Zan all babbled at him in unison.

  Ben ignored them all for a few frozen seconds. Four ships hung poised before Pono, a wide margin north of the silver hoops of the rings. Zan and the transport were impossibly far away, Remi and the tender hung half as far, to the right. Sass and Thrive One lay to the left and down.

  Their plan wouldn’t work.

  Ben blew out and tapped in calculations before they even fully formed in his mind. “Remi, board shuttle and haul ass to coordinates…” He sent them electronically, to a point closest to Remi, possibly achievable for Sass, and one hell of a challenge for himself. “Zan, give my regards to Mahina. Sass, rendezvous with me and Remi at those coordinates. Plan to immediately eject your empty container array. I might not be able to collect it, but I’ll sure deposit mine.”

  “Ben, you can’t make it,” Sass objected.

  “Watch me. Are you moving yet?”

  Because he sure was. He had 23 minutes to get back through that gateway before it closed. He spun Merchant to its new heading on gimbals instead of thrusters, already firing his main engines along the way, steering the ship through simultaneous adjustments in yaw, pitch, and roll. No human being could execute this by eye, but Ben programmed the auto-pilot to do it in nothing flat.

  “Damn, you’re scary,” Sass acknowledged. “Yes, I’m moving!”

  Good. He’d given her only a third as far to go as himself. He’d have given her less, but the gateway would collapse if he took his generator too far from it.

  “Remi, ETA, please.” He was a lot less confident of the engineer’s flying skills.

  “Not on the shuttle yet!”

  “Run faster.” Ben’s fingers never quit moving. He extended his running nav program to lay on max acceleration and deceleration, with a mid-flight flip. He switched channel to ship-wide. “All hands, secure to ship for one hell of a turn.” Absently, he clicked back to the command channel to the other ships.

  “I can make rendezvous!” Zan objected. “Take my shuttle, abandon ship, jump to M
erchant on EVA.”

  “You’re not invited. That was an order, Captain Zan.”

  “Dammit!”

  Ben slammed his head backward to lock his helmet to the headrest. Teke hastily followed suit. The captain never warned his crew twice about his driving.

  “Asteroid!” Teke tried to lurch forward to the guns, only to have his helmet yank him back.

  Instead the captain blasted the rock out of the vicinity. Strictly speaking, that was Sass’s job as their gunship, but he was closer. “Clear. Teke, watch the rocks, please.” There weren’t many this far outside the rings, but Pono’s prodigious collection of orbiting objects did kick some out here and there. This outrageous gravity well simply wasn’t a safe neighborhood to fly.

  “Hands off guns,” Ben warned. Teke raised gauntleted hands in surrender. “Hands on armrest or you’ll dislocate your shoulder.” Teke hastily grabbed his armrests. Ben opted for the grab-bar on the console. “And flip.”

  16

  With Ben’s maximum-aggression acceleration profile, his entire deceleration would be accomplished by flipping the ship. Which went just about 1% over the maximum g-forces the inertial compensators could mask. Sure enough, as the flip set in, everyone and everything in the ship was hurled with a force like a balloon-tired regolith buggy taking a flop onto its roll bar.

  For agonizing seconds Ben hung from his seat by his collar bones. Tunnel vision set in. Teke and the surrounding bulkheads vanished into a view only of his controls before him. Color drained from the dashboard, all meaning fled as reds, greens, and yellows leached to grey. He couldn’t control the ship during this maneuver, only feel it, as the cheerfully striped pumpkin face of Pono careened madly across his ‘windscreen’ display. Listing to the left… He felt a worrisome bit of rocking as well. The cargo was dancing. He hated when that happened. He back-figured in his head. Had he allowed enough slop for their heavy mass this run? Maybe not.

  Before the g-forces even fully released him, as they slowed to facing backward from a few moments ago, Ben strained muscles to force his hand to grab hold of the base of the stick and compensate manually just a touch, and – There. His guts settled back into their proper position. His fingers restored to dexterity, he was already tapping in corrections for the auto-nav to execute. Colors returned, and peripheral vision.