He must stay calm.
The prey who remained calm at first contact often won the final confrontation. His heart was not cooperating with his plan as it thudded a rising tattoo of alarm against the inside of his rib cage. He stumbled to a halt and noticed a small group of people and several flitters. They’d finally come for him.
He turned to bolt for the jungle, flight not fight, but people were coming from that direction as well. He’d gone right past them in his hurry. He whirled looking for an exit.
“Jaron.” The call sounded faintly from one of the distant buildings. For a long, disorienting moment he imagined his sister lived once again and dinner was ready.
“Jaron.”
He’d learned what to do with such hallucinations. He shut his eyes and slowly worked out the chemical structure of chlorophyll. He lost track around the fourth magnesium bond of chlorophyll b. Did it bond to a fourth nitrogen or a CH3 or… the whole molecule came apart and he started again, this time with the lone oxygen. Double bond to carbon. Then…
“Jaron.”
He opened his eyes and Robbie was standing right in front of him. He puffed out his breath. It had worked. His sister and her call to dinner were safely gone.
“Robbie. Thank God. Did you know that above forty meters, the Ceiba has a drastically different diurnal usage of water and carbon dioxide? This explains Parkin’s observations…about…” Over a dozen others had gathered around them.
No escape route now, they were packed in close.
“No! Wait! Jaron. It’s okay. I promise.” Robbie moved toward him. He stumbled backwards on a root and Robbie’s hand clapped onto his shoulder to keep him from falling.
Harold appeared out of nowhere and dove at Robbie’s face. She jumped back and raised her arms.
“Damn it, Harold. It’s just me, Robbie.”
Harold twisted away from his attack at the last second and landed abruptly on Jaron’s shoulder in a great off-balance flurry of wings. Jaron held up his hand out of habit and Harold tapped his beak against Jaron’s father’s golden wedding band. Then he turned to face the woman.
“Bro-brie?”
“Yes, you silly bird. Bro-brie.”
Harold bobbed his head and reached out his beak to be rubbed. As he did so, the watchers burst into applause.
“Wow.”
“Did you see that?”
“That’s cool, Robbie. Will he let us touch him?”
Jaron flinched away from the noise. But Harold put a claw on his ear for balance and started making his rippling noise meaning he was especially pleased. He detected no danger. And Robbie was here.
He looked at the others. They didn’t have weapons. Or blood testers.
“Who are all these people?” he tried to whisper it, but his voice cracked making it even louder than normal.
Robbie moved a step closer. There was no gap. No hope. No open path in the maze of life down which he could bolt. Cheese be damned. Just bolt.
“Where have you been?” Robbie’s ever present warmth heated his blood right through her thin t-shirt. The memory of being held through the night flushed a fire upon his cheeks.
He waved southward. “Up the Orinoco and down the Amazon as usual. You wouldn’t believe what I saw down there. Did you know—”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it back in time. But you did, that’s all that matters.”
Robbie took his arm and started leading him across the clearing.
“The Ceiba…” He didn’t remember the station being this expansive, even when his parents had been taking care of it. It was then he noticed the great silvered shuttle in the clearing. It was so massive, he hadn’t even seen it blending against the sky.
“It has an oxygenation cycle that—” her words penetrated. “In time for what?”
Robbie held tightly onto his arm and kept him moving forward when his feet stalled. Harold was shuffling nervously back and forth across his shoulder.
“We’re going to build a jungle.”
“Build one, but we have a perfectly good one right here.” He tried to turn toward it, but someone had taken his other arm.
“We’re going to build it in the sky.”
“Like a cloud forest?” The ground suddenly inclined sharply and their feet rang as they ascended a ramp up into the dark maw of the shuttle.
“A bit higher. About a thousand kilometers higher.”
“But— But that’s ridiculous. How would you grow a jungle in the sky?”
“Have a seat and I’ll show you.”
He sat in a chair. It was blue. It was cold out of the sun. There were supports for his head, arms, and legs. There were a dozen others like it.
Someone handed a cage to Robbie. A bird cage. It was too small for him, no matter how they might try.
“Come on, Harold.”
She reached up toward his macaw.
“Brob-brie?” Harold sounded worried, but Jaron couldn’t act. His arms lay like lead weights on the armrests.
“When are you going?”
Robbie looked at him and smiled. “If you think I’d try to do this without you, you’re nuts.”
“But Harold. I can’t leave him.” He tried to turn to the bird, now clamped in Robbie’s hands. He couldn’t fly. Not that high.
“He’s going too.”
“Going? Going where? Where is he going?”
Robbie slid Harold into a cage as someone strapped it down on the seat next to him.
“But—”
The man finished strapping the cage and began on Jaron. Broad webs were laid across his chest, arms, and legs. He leaned toward Jaron and patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t y’all worry. I haven’t lost a one yet. I’m not ‘bout to start with you or your bird. He’s going to be bloody King of the Parrots where we’re taking him.”
Jaron looked at Harold working his beak through one of the airholes and trying to break a hole in the cage.
His own voice sounded distant. “He’s a macaw.”
“Yea, Cappy. Don’t you know squat? It’s a macaw.”
“Shut yer trap, Bryce. You ready to light it off?”
“Let’s do it.” The two men moved away.
Robbie’s face came briefly into focus on Harold’s other side. She raised her voice above the building noise of machines come to destroy the jungle. “Did you leave anything back in the trees?”
“In the trees?” Jaron could feel the hot tracks of tears burnings channels down his face. He’d never see the trees again. “Just Harold.”
Robbie finished with her own straps. “He’s right here, Jaron.”
Sure enough, there he was. In a cage. But that wasn’t right. He’d never been in a cage. There was no jungle here. There was nothing green. No life.
A seat with a cage.
Straps.
Robbie had betrayed him. He’d trusted her and been betrayed.
He couldn’t move.
Ready for testing.
Helpless.
Trapped.
They were going to die.
He and Harold would follow father, mother, sister, brother to the grave. Eaten by the great maw of the WEC. A sacrifice upon their unholy altar.
With a shriek from the depths of hell, a mighty force thrust him back into the chair.
Jaron and the macaw screamed together against the engine’s roar.
# # #
“That’s beautiful.”
“Careful, Bryce. You’re facade of blasé is slipping.”
“My what?”
“Man, y’all are dense. Where have you been?”
Bryce ignored Cappy and stared out the viewport. It was his first lift to Stellar One. He’d heard a lot about the Stellar project, but Cappy and his shuttle, the Lazy Jane, had been b
usy doing the heavy lifting to finish LaGrange Colony Delta Echo Swan. Dees Station, as it was now known, was barely finished before the MICE had started sliding over from the other colonies. These tiny craft, just big enough for a family group of three or four and their belongings, were the standard vehicle between the stations. Medium-range Inter-orbital Conveyance with Environment, MICE, his memory was kind enough to offer up.
Sure, he was blasé. When even an idle thought could now bring unsolicited information up from his past self, for that was how he now thought of the Old Bastard, blasé was his best self-defense. At least the O.B. no longer kept a running commentary on his actions.
But damn, Stellar One was an amazing craft.
Size was very hard to judge in space. At first it looked like an intricate ornament for a woman’s necklace. Four tiny wheels spun around a common axis. Actually, only three were spinning. The third one was stalled. The axis stuck out into space and there was a hint of a fifth wheel on the way, two of its six spokes reaching out from the axis.
They were close enough to see another shuttle, Gamma Blue, unloading tiny plas girders by the third ring. Between one blink and the next the scale shifted. The tiny ornament was now huge. Gamma Blue was the only shuttle bigger than Lazy Jane in all of Earth space, and it was little more than a toy next to the Stellar One station.
A few quiet voices raised in wonder behind them. It was quiet, now that they’d sleepy-gassed the screamer in the front row. His bird had shut up when the man had finally passed into a drugged snooze. Which was a good thing, Bryce didn’t want to try guessing the dosage on a bird.
As Cappy guided the shuttle in, the thing kept growing. It stopped fitting within the viewer before they could resolve the first space-suited figure. Cappy let out a long whistle.
“Y’all wouldn’t think this was an empty orbit eight months ago. Hanoi Launch sure has a burr up their ass about this one.”
Bryce tapped into the world datanet to check the planned completion date. “Yesterday,” flashed up on the screen.
Cappy could laugh all he wanted, but it was weird. Launch was not known for its sense of humor. He checked the validation code on their own priority launch records. Signed in the name of the Old Bastard, a level just one below planetary emergency. Bryce was here now because of his parent, whose claws could even reach him in space. Bryce wanted somewhere to spit his throat clear. At least there was some solace that his parent probably didn’t know Bryce was actually here.
Then he noticed the order signature. Suz Jeffers had issued the orders as Project Manager. What was his mother doing managing a construction project for Hanoi Launch?
Bryce struggled to draw a breath, but the image of his mother being forced onto a project by their parent was too depressing. He checked the oxygen readout, but everything appeared normal. The passengers behind them, except for the drugged scientist, were pointing at the structure on the main viewer and putting their heads close together over whispered comments. Then he knew he was wrong. If Suzie was working on Stellar One, it was her choice.
So, it wasn’t a trick. He was still free.
Suddenly he wondered about the coincidence of his ending up in space on the Stellar One project. Had his mom done one of her behind-the-scenes tricks to get him on the Lazy Jane and get him the hell away from the planet of his birth?
“Bryce. Pay attention there, boy.”
He glanced down and saw that he was still running at lift calibration on the engines. He backed down to orbital maneuvering and shut down the main inverters. He slowly became aware of Cappy’s voice rising in irritation on the comm circuit.
“What the hell do y’all mean by ‘land inside ring four south’? How in the hell do I know where south is and that ring is spinning anyway. It’s got to be stable before I’ll be setting this here shuttle anywhere on your damn rig.”
Bryce flipped his headset into the comm circuit so that he could hear what was going on. A very stern woman’s voice was clearly trying to remain patient with little success.
“—south hatch is clearly marked by beacon at 141.3 kilohertz. Tune your encoder.” Bryce did so.
“I see it, honey, but that there thang is still turning and I ain’t goin’ nowheres near it.”
Bryce had never heard Cappy so angry, nor heard so many twisted Texas affectations. He had to mangle Anglese into near incomprehensibility to achieve it, pretty impressive dose of gibberish actually.
“Ring is at one-quarter speed. Inner ring hatch at one-tenth gee minus. We can’t go any slower as other systems and residences are already operating properly for gravity-only environments. Land as ordered.”
Cappy slapped the comm off. “Damn bitch doesn’t know a thing about what these shuttles can do and what they can’t.”
“Hate to do this,” he offered in an aside to Bryce before opening another frequency. “Gamma Blue, you there Jamie?”
“Roger that, Cappy. How’re things on the lone wide prairie?”
Bryce tried to imagine what the woman behind the sweet voice looked like. She sounded cute.
“ ‘Bout as ugly as you’d expect. You landed on the inside of one of these rings yet?”
“Are we having trouble? My poor little cowboy has forgotten how to drive his wagon? My beast is bigger than yours and I had no trouble slipping onto Three. We getting old there, Cappy? Do we need to put you out to pasture?”
“Just remember I’ll always be five decades younger than you, you old wench. I’m talking about Four. What the hell’s the trick?”
Five decades on Cappy. That made her old enough to be Perry’s mom. Oh, well, nice voice though.
“Four? But that ring is spun up.”
“You noticed that all by yourself, did you?”
“Can’t be done. I’ll tell you, Cappy. The controllers on this project are nuts.”
“Some big help you are, Jamie. Remind me not to buy you a drink next time I see you.” He snapped off the comm before she could respond.
Cappy began sidling the big craft between the stable third and the spinning fourth ring. At just fifty meters off the moving ring, he backed down to a halt. Bryce watched as the spokes ticked slowly by, swinging onto the left side of the viewer and slicing upward to disappear moments later from the upper right corner.
He spotted the south hatch going by, between two of the spokes, its frame marked by four flashing beacons. Shuttles were not designed to fly in circles, but that was just what Cappy’d have to do to get on that wheel.
Bryce toggled a wing camera to the main viewer and heard people behind him gasp. Side on, that close up, the station was moving very fast.
“Hey, Cappy.”
“What?” His voice was a little panicky, his cowboy image was cracking under the strain.
“Let’s say we drive ahead with main engines at twenty meters a second.”
“That’d send us straight to the moon. The ring is only spinning at twelve.”
“And you fire the bow deorbiting thruster at eight. But only the lower set.”
There was a silence as Cappy communed briefly with the computer on his command console.
“Damn, this damned machine says it’s impossible. But that jes’ might work. Fire those big inverters back up.”
Bryce had the engines back online in only a few minutes while Cappy messed with the programming.
“Shit. Some idiot of a coder made an interlock so you can’t autofire both at once. Bryce you take the main thrust and I’ll take the bow control.”
“But—”
“Look, Conroy is down sick from that stupid snake bite during loading. I need you to fly the mains. I can’t do both. Just hold it steady.”
Bryce nodded and slid his sweating palm against the joy stick. Some memory, thrown up from Bryce Senior’s training recognized the sensation. He triggered the firing sequence and held it true to ce
nter so that they didn’t drift toward the ring. It wasn’t him, but rather his parent controlling his body.
He tried not to think about it.
Bryce didn’t know the right sensations, butdidn Bryce Senior did, though he was none too confident either. There was a difference between training and doing, and neither of them had any experience. Bryce focused on the console and lit off the engine when the inverter was ten percent into the green. The vapor pulsed away as the splitter broke the water molecules and fused the hydrogen. The burning oxygen powered the process and the shuttle slid forward.
Cappy fired the bow thrusters and the shuttle accelerated but, impossibly, stayed in line with the ring. The ring wall rose across the wing camera as they dropped toward the outer edge. Cappy compensated with more thrust while Bryce’s hand held steady under his parent’s training and his own best guess.
The side of the ring stopped rising and, after holding stable for what seemed forever, began sliding the other way. They came even with the inside of the ring but were a quarter rotation behind the desired hatch. Cappy pushed them up into a tighter orbit around the central spindle.
Bryce flipped on a tail camera. They still had a hundred meters to spare before the spindle became a problem. Their tighter orbit moved them faster about the ring. When they’d caught up with the hatch, Bryce eased back and they dropped into a lower orbit in perfect alignment with the hatch.
Cappy tweaked them sideways with the thrusters.
“Gotta do this fast if we don’t want to melt the ring with our mains.”
Bryce activated the hatch grapples. As Cappy slid into place, Bryce slammed the grapples and the engine cutoffs at the same moment. It was risky as all hell, but any thrust after the moment they were connected would tear everything apart.
The Lazy Jane slammed the last meter to the ring, actually the ring slammed into them, as the shuttle once again tried to move straight ahead in the direction of its momentum. The grapples held and Bryce cycled the inverters down.
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