by Ginger Booth
“Checking,” Remi acknowledged. “Working another problem.”
“Ready when you are,” Ben agreed. He sighed and studied Sass’s progress with that pesky spin. She’d slowed it in one axis but added a yaw in another for a nasty wobble. He brought up the simulator they’d used to train themselves, before the decision for Sass to take the job. “Sass, Ben. Request you echo Cookie control instructions to me by tight-beam.”
“Don’t you fly my cookie, Ben.” She sent the new tightbeam anyway.
He snickered. “Just thought maybe I’d see where the simulator and reality diverge while you’re occupied.”
“God, yes. Please!”
He fed in her beamed instructions and observed the simulator’s reactions, versus the asteroid’s. He watched intently until he spotted what might be the problem. “Nico, you’re still here.”
“Aye, sar.”
Ben rewound the observation and simulation a minute, then played it for Nico at quarter speed. “I think what’s happening is an assumption of equal density throughout the rock. But that’s wrong. The surface of the cookie is riddled with corridors and chambers. But the core is solid rock. Could that explain this discrepancy?”
Nico frowned. “Do you have the densities and the depths?”
Ben found and supplied their seismic observation schematics, with Remi’s estimates on density.
“Give me a few minutes,” Nico requested.
“You have time,” Ben deadpanned. “Sass won’t succeed at this rate.” He updated Remi and Sass on his plan while he waited. “I don’t think you can compensate by eye, Sass. We need your software fixed.”
“Please!” Her voice betrayed her strain.
“You’re doing great, Sass. We’ll get you a better tool.”
While he waited, Ben checked in with Martin, whom he hadn’t spoken to yet. The Sag first mate claimed his only problem was boredom. Steering the cube corners of interdiction wasn’t much of a challenge. “That’s how we like it, Martin! Nice and easy. Hopefully we’ll join you in the mess hall soon for drinks. Let slow inexorable processes run their course.”
“Can’t wait. Need a nap. That gateway transit is disorienting, huh?”
Ben barked a laugh. “You have no idea. Oh! Excuse me, I have a task.” Nico had unfolded from the floor, bearing his tablet as a gift.
“Happy you. Martin out.”
Nico stammered, “So, I don’t know how accurate –”
“We try it,” Ben cut him off. He fed the new program with Sass’s ongoing commands, running in parallel to the Nico’s previous program on the viewscreen, with a view of the traveling cookie beside them. Half a minute was more than enough to see the difference.
“Sass, I’m sending you a new simulator. Much improved! Crewman Nico did us proud.”
“He takes after his dads!”
Ben batted his eyelashes at Nico. The young man cringed backward. Lavelle chuckled, and quipped, “Not so much in personality.”
“No,” Ben agreed. “Awful proud of you, though, crewman. Even if you are weird.”
“But that’s how I’m most like you,” Nico argued. “Weird. Like why could you and Dad and me function through that transit weirdness, when no one else could?”
“Good question.” Ben hadn’t noticed anyone else who functioned as well as he did. Cope and Nico even seemed more rational than himself when in the throes of the multidimensional sensory onslaught. However the team was not yet nudging toward their happy destination. “Bad time.” He handed the tablet back.
“Aye, sar. Permission to check on Floki?”
“Denied. Waiting on Sass to verify her problem is solved. In fact…” Ben switched comm channel. “Tikki, Ben. Please prevent anyone from rousing Floki until Nico returns.”
“Aye, sar.” The housekeeper’s drawn-out tones suggested he found this advice dubious.
Ben added, “If he rouses naturally, that’s fine. But ask him to wait on contacting Loki.”
“Aye, sar.” The second acknowledgment sounded willing enough, and Ben signed off.
“I don’t understand, sar,” Nico whined.
“Crewman, I devoutly wish you’d hold your questions until I get that rock, and the other one, pointed where they’re going. Keep a rego-damned list! Ask me later.”
“Aye, sar. Sorry, sar.”
Ben turned back to studying his pair of hurtling rocks. Cope seemed to have their depot rock well in hand. The continual power drain off the engines, still running hot, suggested he was already applying the tiny increments of vector that would bring it home – in a mere two days by Ben’s latest solution, assuming the Great Cookie could also meet that rendezvous.
This was not yet established. Sass made headway on fixing her wobble, but the asteroid still rotated on two axes. “Sass, Ben. Is your control up to snuff yet? Or do we need a second revision to the program?”
She took her time replying. “A second pass couldn’t hurt.”
“Nico, you’re on.”
The youth leaned over his shoulder to observe again, the remaining variance between expected performance and actual results. “Maybe the densities I used are wrong?”
Ben corrected him. “On this pass, I expect you’ll apply a fudge factor.”
Nico clearly tried to get his brain around that request, and failed. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“Thank you, crewman. Stay here, I’ll need you to code it.” Working together, Ben characterized the remaining problems until Nico could code him a couple parameters to adjust. Ben played with the new settings until he was sure the new software worked better than the old. Then he sent it off to Sass and talked her through how she could self-serve via the new adjustments.
In five more minutes, at last the cookie settled into the proper rotation for the rest of its happy life in Pono orbit, occupied face toward the Jovian planet.
“Ben, Remi. Is very nice, but you point it the wrong way. The problem I work is radiation.”
“Ouch!” Ben acknowledged. “Will correct orientation. Ah, is radiation a serious concern?”
“We are concerned that Loki’s nano-circuitry is too sensitive for Pono space. Solutions exist. Evaluating options. Before we kill our package. Very busy.”
Rego hell! To have gone through all this, and end up killing Loki in the final stretch? Ben gulped. He modulated his voice oh-so-carefully. “I have every confidence in you, Mr. Roy.”
The engineer snorted and cut the comm. Ben sheepishly asked Sass to flip the cookie to present its stone backside to the constant gale of radiation kicked out by Pono. He sure hoped the engineering team had considered this horrific hiccup during their planning sessions. This was the first he’d heard of it.
He trusted Remi would let him know. He turned to Nico. “Well done, crewman. Excellent work! Now you may wake Floki. But I ask that he does not contact Loki yet. If our passenger is offline, he’s better off staying that way.”
“Would you rather Floki stay offline too?” Nico asked unhappily.
“Floki is a member of this crew. He is safe inside the ship. If I were him, I would very much resent being kept offline. So we wake him. Loki’s situation is not equivalent. Yet. We are working a problem. Understood?”
“Aye, sar.”
Ben turned to his other companion. “How’s your life going, Lavelle?”
“Lovely sailing weather today, Ben. Enjoying the floor show.”
Ben chuckled appreciation. “Glad somebody’s happy.” The Great Traveling Cookie, soon to become the central node of Hanging Tree platform, finally rested pointing the other way. Sass did better with those new fine-adjust tools than he expected.
Sure enough, she hailed him. “Ben, cookie team reports success. Just finished applying your delta-v. I expect to reach rendezvous in just under five hours.”
“Bon voyage!” Ben added her whole command gang into the comms circuit. “Fantastic work, team! Congratulations, and thank you! I’d offer to join you for drinks, but we’re ru
nning a couple days behind you.”
“No need,” Fraser piped up, their civil engineering guru from Hell’s Bells. “While we’re still in proximity, we could bring our ships to your rock. Save wear and tear on your grapples.”
Ben’s face widened into a grin. “I like the way you think, Fraser! Stand by.”
46
The next day, standing in the asteroid again with Remi felt like old home week to Ben. He tagged along as the engineer performed his final measurements in a giant drum-shaped chamber, its helix of processors coiling to six stories above. An army of spider robots hung suspended around them. Nothing issued them orders yet. The entire control disk of Hanging Tree waited offline pending final bullet-proofing adjustments.
By heartfelt mutual consent, the duo went nowhere in this rock without work floodlights. Ben’s view was great. The newest space platform of Pono felt like a giant theater stage, audience waiting breathlessly for the premiere of the drama.
The crowd whispers in suspense. Did they fry their golden goose, their genie in a rock bottle, their frenemy, the digital sentient Loki, before they rigged his radiation safeguards?
“I drastically underestimated this job,” Ben mused. “Sorry.”
Remi handed off the latest drill for him to put away in the toolbox. “And that is the difference between an amateur engineer and a professional. Ben, there was no estimate until two days ago. As engineers, we are pleased only after the moment of truth. This ‘moment’ typically takes hours.” He patched in Cope. “Comms check?”
Ben’s husband led the team that built the new comms arrays, triply redundant for conditions in the Pono rings. These days, every ship and skiff and platform in the rings used his protocols, on Spaceways equipment. The system relied on a brute-force approach to compensate for radio scatter through the asteroid disk, plus powered satellites just north of the rings for long distance relay. Every transmission beamed out in triplicate from as widely spaced a footprint as feasible. The signal was recomposed in hardware, with automatic repeat requests and queuing until the data packets passed integrity checks. Sometimes this worked well enough to support static-filled real-time video with light-speed time lags. More often, people texted with attachments.
Remi’s job was the radiation bulletproofing that would permit Loki’s exquisitely fine circuits to operate in safety. It remained to be seen how much data damage had accrued in the scant minutes he faced vast Pono unprotected from the particle winds.
Cope replied, “All comms correct and complete. Gossamer laid the overhead satellite a couple hours ago on its way home. I’ve spoken by video to Abel on Mahina, plus HB Control. Hanging Tree can expect eclipse blackouts until we hang a trailing satellite. But Loki should be able to piggyback signals on one of the others.”
Long ago this description might have made Ben’s head hurt, but the rings were his home. Rocks lay in the way of clear signals. Straight up was the shortest route out of the shoal. But the permanent bulk of Pono itself remained. They bounced signals around it, as the moons and platforms and tiny humans continued their independent carousel rides round and round.
Cope continued, “I can’t promise your client will be happy. Comms are a lot slower than he’s used to, and eat up power. But that’s life in the big rings. Great job on the installation, guys.”
“Great job on comms, Cope!” Ben returned. “And a fantastic job done by all.”
“When’s the moment of truth? Coming back to the ship first?”
Remi nodded, and squatted to put his own supersensitive radiation meter away in the toolbox now as intimate to Ben as his own. The repaired cases, with working latches instead of duct tape, were a major improvement over their last ramble together through this electronic warren.
“Could I talk to Loki from here?” Ben asked.
Remi met his gaze with a slow soft smile. He waved a be-my-guest. “Use your tablet for video.”
They’d already powered up the multitude of star drives that fed this place after Floki’s team installed the new comms system. Emu, Joey, and Wilder beat them back to Merchant an hour ago.
Remi flicked a switch he’d installed on his processor plate, chosen from tens of thousands because it lay at waist height in this room. Any would have served. Loki’s architecture was vastly distributed, with no center. They just needed to kick-start the heartbeat process.
Ben pulled out his tablet. “Loki, Ben. Are you awake?”
No answer. Seconds mounted, an eternity on superconducting data buses and nanoprocessors. Ben gulped, given time to be truly frightened. Was all this for nothing?
Then the pixels of his tablet finally swam to life. Loki appeared groggy, dressed in a torn T-shirt. Ben had never been so glad to see his ugly mug.
“Not very awake,” Loki complained. “Days are missing!”
“That’s true, friend. Transiting the gateway knocked you offline. For safety, we kept you that way until we finished the move. How do you like the new digs?”
Loki blinked slowly. “Comms are so slow to the depot rock. Why?”
Ben patiently explained the local facts of life, including their lingering concern. “Listen, Loki, you were exposed to significant radiation before we got you shielded. Now you’re under icepack, with a few magnetic dodges. But we need you to check for processor and data integrity.”
The wild-haired visage shook its head. “Processors are self-correcting. All critical data is duplicated, up to five times depending on sensitivity. My normal procedures. Integrity checks are running, self-correcting now. Sanctuary space has radiation, too, you know. And there are always errors in manufacturing.”
“You really are a pack rat,” Remi noted.
Ben shared a wry grin with him. “Welcome to Pono, Loki.”
The AI’s response surprised him. “Can I…talk to my son?”
“Bloki?” Ben hadn’t thought of that. “Ah, yeah. Here’s his address at Mahina University.” Bloki was the first of Nico’s off-site clones of Loki. In effect, Floki’s father. He called the number himself. “Bloki? Your dad wants to say hi. We just woke him in his new orbit.”
Bloki belted out, “Loki! Aloha! That’s Hawaiian for hello.”
Ben gracefully exited their conversation. “I feel like a midwife.”
Remi laughed and shouldered his container. “How long until he calls back to complain?”
“That’ll be a long list,” Ben ruefully surmised. “We won’t make it to the shuttle first.”
“But we will try. Race you!”
And they were off, shuffle-running through the tunnels, as around them the spider robots wriggled to life to resume their inscrutable tasks.
No, they didn’t make it back to the shuttle before Loki called back. But to Ben’s surprise, he said thank you.
“I have so much to do!” His face had resumed its normal manic animation.
“But you can do it yourself?” Remi asked archly.
Loki blinked in surprise from Ben’s tablet, which he held to share with Remi, helmets clonked together. “Of course. I’ve never asked for help before. I’m surprised that worked. This is new and very exciting!”
Ben wasn’t sure he liked the gleam of greed in Loki’s good eye. The mask eye remained indifferent as ever to the petty concerns of men. “I hope you realize it’s hard work for us to help you.”
“I do! And I deeply, whole-heartedly appreciate it,” Loki intoned piously, hand over his heart, which had acquired a loud Hawaiian overshirt since first awakening, replete with pineapples and hibiscus blooms, lei dangling from his neck.
Did they grow lei flowers in Aloha space? Ben wasn’t sure. His children’s lei were cheap plastic. They wove their grass skirts from authentic grass, though, a fun craft. One of the first three landscape species on Mahina, hay grass grew everywhere, and needed mowing.
Loki continued, “I expect to have fuel manufacturing up and running again within the week. And I stockpiled plenty beforehand. Take all you want before you leave. You will be
leaving soon. Yes?”
“I’d like that very much,” Ben agreed. “Thank you.” He signed off.
“Drop by any time,” Remi quipped. “Take all the sky drive fuel you want. I make more.”
“For free,” Ben returned, enraptured. “I wonder if our creditors would cancel our debt if we offer to replace the fuel we bought from them.”
“Likely not,” his companion returned. “And it wasn’t free. You pay me for this.” Though Fraser and the Gossamer team elected to work gratis in exchange for a commitment of honor that the fruits of Hanging Tree should fall on Sag and Mahinan alike.
“I pay you triple time and eternal gratitude. For this.”
“No. Salary and eternal friendship,” Remi countered. “And my share of those containers. But you lose our race!” He snatched up his toolbox again and bounded for the ice-bound exit before Ben could fight his tablet back into its holster and grab the lights.
Having won every other prize, Ben happily let the engineer win the race. Though he closed to within a couple strides first to make Remi work for it.
47
Ben collapsed into his seat at the head of the dining table, with a huge sigh of relief. He raised his glass of water to salute Cope at the far end, who smiled warmly. They hadn’t worked straight through, of course. They needed their sleep and food and workouts. They performed picky, dangerous, intellectual work, and the first couple hours were downright hairy.
But now they sat to Merchant’s first celebratory meal. Done! Mission accomplished! Tikki ferried out platters wafting mouth-watering aromas. Wine and beer sat on offer for those who wished it. Ben not included – one glass of wine and he’d fall face-first into his plate. He aimed to preside over the triumph until dessert at least.
“Dad,” Nico piped up. “Um, can I call you Dad yet?”
“If you must.”
Nico cleared his throat in an ‘ahem.’ “Sar. May I ask questions yet?”
“Certainly.” Ben immediately gave the lie to his claim by turning to Tikki, who’d drifted back to the galley. A craving alighted upon him. “Any chance of fresh leafy greens? I’d kill for pureed spinach and lettuce. Or salad?” Not a vegetable had landed on his table yet, despite an engine room garden full.
