by Ginger Booth
“Tell me, Remi, do your parents still live?” He winced the moment the question was out of his mouth. Though they were the same age now, Remi lost eight years to his trip to Sanctuary with Sass. Without Yang-Yangs, Ben’s father would be long gone. He’d only thought to get to know the engineer better.
“My father is dead,” Remi supplied. “My mother, I don’t know, but probably. They divorced when I was nine. She wanted no more babies. Never saw her again.”
Ben blinked. “I think…I don’t understand enough about Saggy – Sag – family structure. Why did your mother never see you again?”
Remi sighed. “Babies. You understand the baby schedule? No. Aristocrats, the woman marries very young. Mère was fourteen.”
“That’s young!”
“Yes, and Pere was thirty. The idea is an obedient woman, yes? But little love. Then the babies arrive, once every four years for an aristocrat, three for the freemen, two for the slaves. Like clockwork. The only way to escape them is to break the marriage, or reach age 50. So Mère had six children – I am the fourth, second son. Always for an aristocrat it is boy, girl, girl, boy, then girl-boy until the end. Four years apart. Freemen maybe the same pattern, but three years apart. Paddies get girl-boy from the start. Freemen more often marry for love, or partnership. Same age.”
“What if a couple comes from two classes? Aristocrat marries freeman?”
“The woman raises babies. The man determines class. But an aristocrat must marry another aristocrat or lose his domes.”
“For marriage, you’re an aristocrat?”
“No. I am the spare boy, in case my older brother is foolish, or dies young. He lives and marries correctly, has a first son. So I become a freeman before college. I cannot marry an aristocrat.”
Ben removed the outer cover from the tower. Its control feed of insulated cable fed straight into the stone wall. So inside was his only access point. “Were you close to your family?”
“My parents, no. My sisters yes. My brothers, I don’t know well. We leave for school in Landing at age ten. My little brother a toddler. My older brother finishing college.”
Sagamore Landing was the capital city, the giant dome Ben had visited during his brief stint as a slave janitor. “You don’t die of radiation cancers on Sagamore, do you.”
“We did. The drugs are new, invented maybe when I am an infant. Now the population grows. Especially slaves.”
Ben had worked so hard to bring Sanks, Denali, and paddies into Mahina. And he’d worked with Hell’s Bells since he first started in space. He found it uncomfortable to realize this was all news to him. It was wrong, for him to be so close to Denali friends, but never Sagamore. “Maybe Loki can bring our moons closer together, Mahina and Sagamore.”
“Maybe give us something to argue over,” Remi differed. “I worry. We have no war in Aloha. This is a good thing.”
A loud ping! sounded in Ben’s helmet. “Fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Merchant.”
His ship would return to find an abandoned shuttle on the asteroid. What would they do? They had the second shuttle from the tender. Wilder would demand to charge in after him. Ben smiled at the thought. Judge was a skilled miner, but he was in command, with no one to hand off the job. Ben imagined the net result was that they’d dither for an hour. Then Wilder and Joey would head into the asteroid looking for them, possibly with Nico. While Teke, Hugo, Floki, and Judge sought answers from Loki.
This didn’t do him a fat lot of good, he concluded unhappily. But it did remind him of Zan and Wilder’s approach in the machine tunnels of Sanctuary. They blasted wanton destruction. We are communicating! Crude, but it got the message across.
He broke the antenna array off the short tower, and checked on the robots. They continued busily affixing plates. That stood to reason. They buffered their instructions, and wouldn’t stop until they ran out.
Still too intimidated to deal with the tower’s innards, he studied its surface further. Yes, it had sensors to observe its charges. He followed Remi’s lead and duct-taped the device’s eyes.
That left the inscrutable guts inside. “Remi, how do you give instructions to the cart?”
“Ah…” He resorted to the translator on that one. “Puppet jerker, we call it. Cope has one. Most Mahina engineers don’t. An interface device for sending numerical control instructions to robotics. Trial and error. Almost done.”
“I’m impressed!” He explained his status and reasoning to the engineer. “But I’m stuck. Can your puppet controller use this to talk to Loki?”
“No. A puppet jerker sends a command, then you see how the robot moves. Your device, it has no reaction to see. I come get you when I figure out how to make the cart turn around.”
“It reverses,” Ben noted. “Either direction.”
“Oh! Duh, yes.”
Ben gave up on the tower and pulled out his map. With a quiet moment, he thought he might add annotations of when the cart veered around the tunnel tubes. But he couldn’t recall. And the tunnels looked so much alike. He wouldn’t recognize familiar landmarks. He had zero confidence this map was good enough to backtrack. And they didn’t have enough air to to survive getting lost at this juncture.
But the cart would return to the nanofab. His mapping was good from there, with etching as well. “Remi, you’ll hate me for this.”
“What.”
“We need to take this waiting cart back to the nanofab. Not the one you’re fixing. Our map isn’t good enough.”
The engineer swore briefly.
“Your learning is valuable,” Ben consoled him. “We’ll use it on the cart later.”
“But do we know it returns to the nanofab?”
“Good point,” Ben allowed, with a long sigh. The cart left here to dump trash. Then it might sit waiting for another task. Which might not come because one Captain Acosta broke the job controller. “I don’t know.”
“If one comes, we decide then,” Remi said softly. “You can stop a cart. Rest and heal. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” Ben sourly realized that left him thinking and imagining again. For a man with a lot on his mind, this was not good news.
“I met your father,” Remi noted, resuming the conversation. “You are lucky he lives. A kind man.”
“Yeah.” Nathan Acosta was a treat to everyone but his son. Ben, he criticized nonstop. “He thinks I’m an airhead. But he’s a great dad.”
The conversation fell into a lull. Ben’s robot companions gradually fell to inaction, then scuttled to some sort of recharging bay, a reasonable default. Perhaps he should take the hint and take a nap.
Remi asked, “Why are you unhappy to bring Loki to Pono? He solves many problems.”
“Yeah. But I don’t want the problems he creates. I’m afraid of unemployment mostly. Loki, Spaceways, immigrants, all of it. Who died and left me God?” He surprised himself with the vehemence of his vexation.
Remi laughed out loud. “You are a captain! In command. A decision must be made. You make it.”
“But why me? I’m nothing much. A ship driver. I have opinions. So does everyone else. Mahina is a democracy. Everyone’s opinion counts the same.”
“Sagamore is not a democracy. Each occupation makes decisions based on what they know. Mahina, I think too, is not a democracy. You elect politicians. You hope they do what they promise. But they promise things they cannot deliver. You don’t vote on issues. You vote on people to decide issues.”
“We vote on them based on their opinions on issues. And their personalities. Whether we trust them.” Ben wondered if he ever trusted a politician in his life. No. Voting was simpler in Poldark, before Mahina Actual lost its power. Now settler governments actually did something besides collect water tax. They run creches. Fortunately, Mahina University still controlled the terraforming.
“Your government does not work,” Remi echoed his thoughts. “Sagamore works too well. Denali is maybe more education than government. The government trains them to b
e the government. They’re all insane together. Sanctuary left government to an insane AI while they play sports. Cantons, also insane.”
“If you could go back to Sagamore, would you?”
“No. I am like you. I live in the rings, which is no country. Do you miss Poldark?”
Ben snorted. “No. I like visiting Schuyler. But it’s Cope’s town, not mine. I don’t belong in Poldark at all. Never did.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Ben. By Sag standards, you make the right choice with Loki. And save lives. We have too few people. We cannot lose more. Our ability to make things, it is too small. We need technology to survive. Loki helps us survive, maybe thrive. You know what you’re doing.”
Ben listened to this, nearly holding his breath. Most annoyingly, a tear formed in his eye. He grimaced. “But who am I?”
“You are one who understands these things. And has the power to act. So you act. You are not the only one. If we work for Thrive Spaceways, we believe in this mission, yes? It certainly isn’t the pay.” Irritation tinged his voice. “But the lifestyle is very nice. For space.”
“It’s people who make it good,” Ben agreed. “We’ve got great people. You included.”
“And you keep an idiot like Wilder. A whore like Tikki. Quire is charity, Zan a traitor. Sass makes her ship a family. Your ship, more like miscellaneous rejects.”
Ben chuckled sadly. “Does my crew seem that bad to you?” Sass’s crew were an odd lot of rejects, too, himself included. She molded them into more. He aspired to do the same. But maybe instead he sank to their level.
“I did not say bad,” Remi corrected him. “I am also a reject.”
“Not to me,” Ben assured him. “You know that. You remember how hard I worked to recruit you.” He’d crossed the line. Sass wanted to strangle him. But she had two excellent engineers, and only needed one. While Ben and Cope ran an engineering company, not a single ship.
“I am flattered.” Remi sighed melodramatically. “I found reverse. I can steer the cart. Now, captain, do we stay or go? I vote go. But we are not a democracy.”
Ben eyed his vandalism sadly. He hoped Loki got the message. But their margin for error on the air canisters was too tight. They must act.
“Go.” Like the man said, the captain’s duty was to decide. Especially when the choice was clear as mud.
23
Relief flooded Ben as they pulled to a stop facing a 7-way intersection. This was their third crossroads since the new-plate room. At one of two consecutive 4-way intersections in the meantime, he’d chosen the wrong branch and landed at a 5-way. He’d been about 90% sure he’d then corrected for their rotation, but he wasn’t sure until just this moment.
He alighted, barely limping anymore, and let Remi mark the corridor while he figured out which of six options could be described as ‘the right index finger.’ He comforted himself that there were only four possible orientations, because the veers and cart 180 summed to some multiple of a right angle. But he approached the task by testing each of six outlets in turn, placing himself in each opening and holding his gauntleted right hand out before him like a claw. The wrist only twinged now.
His third corridor fit the bill. He hung a spare washer in mid-air to mark it. But he continued on methodically to test candidate four. No, he hadn’t expected that one to be it. Unfortunately, he could make a good case for door number five. “Remi? This one or that one? Come look.”
“We have no time for this!” But the engineer grudgingly shot over and checked the view from corridor three, then five. “I want to say this one. But I do not know. Damn.”
Ben pulled out his gels and marked an arrow on the wall, plus a question mark. “Mark the other one a question, please. No arrow. Then let’s go.”
“Next we have a landmark?” Remi asked hopefully.
Ben replied evenly, “Next we have three four-way intersections in a row. The fourth is the T-intersection.” He hoped his voice didn’t quaver. “Only two more to reach the marked intersections. You swapped air canisters?”
“While I worked on the cart,” Remi agreed.
That was an hour and a half ago. Ben skated his way back to their ride. After Remi rejoined him and drove through the intersection, he reasoned aloud, “About three hours per canister. We have one and an eighth left. What other options?”
“You don’t think we’ll make it.” Remi drove, rather than teach the captain the unfamiliar controller he used.
It’ll be close. “Option. One of us goes cryo. Others? Brainstorm with me.”
“Electrolysis on our water,” Remi volunteered grudgingly. “But all other options, they take time! And our water.”
“We can last a day without water.” But Remi knew that. “We could find another exit. On the surface, we can navigate easier. I think the surface is that way.” He pointed right. “But I’m not sure.”
“We see only two T intersections,” Remi reasoned. “One was our entrance.”
“Yeah, but the other wasn’t.”
Remi tried again. “The smelter must send its dross to the surface.”
Ben allowed, “That one might work. OK, escape, backtrack, make air, find air, talk to Loki. Any other possibilities?”
“What are you trying to figure out?”
“When to give up on this and try something else.”
“Merde.” They stopped at another 4-way intersection. Ben strode across to mark their egress, while Remi marked the way they came.
“Oxides!” the engineer blurted suddenly. “The nanofab. The robot arms, some deposit oxidation layers! If we reach there, we have oxygen.”
“Bingo. Thank you, Remi!”
They worked in silence until the cart trundled forward again. Then Remi hesitantly asked, “Is Loki looking for us, you think?”
“Yeah.” Ben asserted assurance, despite his doubts.
The disproof of that theory was that no express robot had arrived to whisk them off to safety. “I know what I’d tell him, if I were on Merchant. Find our captain or we have no choice but –”
“– Leave me no choice but to warp back to Mahina immediately!” Judge claimed. “And man, will Ben’s husband be pissed!”
Granted, Ben’s husband fought with his wits and fists. Ben was the one who favored asteroid-carving guns and berserkers.
The wild-haired avatar of Loki slammed his desk with both hands. He leaned into the monitor to scream. They sat in the dining room, so this grew his face over a meter tall. “I tell you, he isn’t there!”
“Of course he’s in the asteroid!” Judge insisted. “Where else could he be?”
Teke lounged at the table alongside Nico, Hugo, and Floki. The physicist mused, “That’s an interesting question. Loki, we know that Ben and Remi entered the asteroid. Not once, but twice. They planned to hunt for a nanofab. The shuttle is missing their grav sleds, oxygen bottles, tool boxes. This suggests they’re in the asteroid. Doesn’t it?”
“But then why would the shuttle be drifting fifteen klicks away from the asteroid?” Loki wailed. “They left! And then something happened!”
“Something like what?”
“Maybe they had to eject. I don’t know!”
“If they ejected, where would they go?” Nico reasoned. “Except back to the asteroid.”
“Please look, grandfather,” Floki interceded.
“I have no way to look. Except…” Loki’s face froze on the screen.
Eventually Judge asked, “Did our comms lock up?”
Loki suddenly resumed, now leaning thoughtfully back in his chair. “Yes, there has been a disturbance inside the asteroid. I didn’t search far enough from the nanofab. They went a long way. The wrong way.”
“Perhaps they took a wrong turn,” the Ganny AI specialist Hugo suggested.
“Get them on screen!” Judge hollered. “I demand to talk to them!”
“Forget that!” Nico countered. “Loki, my dad’s nearly out of air!”
Loki frow
ned. “Why would I keep nitrox on a computing node?”
“Grandfather, you can make nitrox,” Floki encouraged. “Can’t you?”
“Well, of course, in industrial quantities! No nitrox, no canisters. And I don’t know where they are! Only where they were.”
Judge took his turn slamming fists into the table. “Find them! Now! We can supply nitrox in canisters. But you’ve got to get them to an exit! Alive!”
With only an hour of air remaining, the little cart turned at the T-intersection. And there, in all its glory, was the nanofab. Ben laid his helmet down on his arms and took a few sobbing breaths.
Remi threw his arms around his captain and hugged him. “You did it!”
“We did it.” Ben blinked tears of relief out of his eyes. The cart’s gravity field traced them down his cheeks. “OK. Oxygen. How can I help?”
Remi found another doorway to tuck the cart into and pulled to a halt. After Ben hopped overboard, he handed out his toolbox and a couple empty canisters, then climbed out after him with the same. “This way.”
Ben followed along the slow conveyor belt Remi had studied, somewhat different from the quicker one he’d tracked. They reached a spot where the plate entered a process box sitting on the belt. A quick glance informed Ben that the plates emerged a different color than they went in.
But that wasn’t Remi’s interest. “No tank.” The engineer studied the hoses connected to the box. “White for lox.”
“That’s rather trusting, isn’t it?” Ben complained. “I’m not going to breathe something because it comes from a white hose.”
“No. Fire test.” Remi disconnected the white hose and studied its valve. They couldn’t hear whether it hissed.
Ben pulled out one of their handy Sagamore emergency air bubble kits. “Around you? Around your arm?”
“Wait.” Remi thought through his dexterity challenges, then rammed a fine electronic screwdriver in to jam open the valve. This instantly spewed a stream of pretty blue liquid oxygen. Unfortunately it also struck a spark, so a split second later, the stream lit on fire.
