by Ginger Booth
Migrant Thrive
Thrive Space Colony Adventures Box Set Books 7-9
Ginger Booth
Copyright © 2020-2021 Ginger Booth
All rights reserved.
Cover by Raphael Francavilla and Ginger Booth
Skyship image © Freestyleimages | Dreamstime.com
Diagrams by Ginger Booth
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Prosper & Thrive
Prologue
Diagram
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Map of Cantons
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Sylvan Thrive
Prologue
Diagrams
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Sentient Thrive
Prologue
Diagrams
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Afterword
Author’s Note
Also by Ginger Booth
Prosper & Thrive
Book 7
Prologue
Launched on a shoestring, the colonists
were humanity’s only hope for survival.
They were failing in the Aloha star system.
The Thrive crew turned that around.
Sass Collier took eleven years on Thrive to reach Sanctuary, secret bastion of the Colony Corps.
Prosper developed a better warp drive.
They caught up to her in days.
They liberated Sanctuary from its rogue AI.
Now the Sanks seek a new home world.
They hired Thrive Spaceways to assist.
Will it be Mahina? Denali?
Or the unknown world of Cantons?
Diagram
Prosper floorplan. Thrive is similar.
Crew shift between the two ships.
1
John Copeland harbored deep misgivings about this outing, like the screaming war cries of half a dozen pterodactyls circling above the ship. Pterries for short. He double-checked his children’s breath masks.
His eldest son, Nico, age sixteen, insisted he wouldn’t be caught dead in shorts and mesh camp shirt. His teen obstinacy was self-correcting. He’d regret it soon enough. In contrast, Cope’s youngest, nine-year-old Socrates, looked like a native born Denali, except for his short dark hair. When his dad told him to wear shorts, Sock aimed to please.
“He’ll be fine, Cope,” Teke growled, his bald head glistening with sweat. The Denali-born physicist was a good looking guy, with golden skin. He stowed away on Thrive to leave his homeworld half his life ago. “My survival genes are dominant, remember? That’s why you look like me, right, Sock?”
Sock clutched Cope tighter, his favorite of three dads. The boy would rather be like his brother Nico in every way. But he nodded resolutely, determined to face Dad-T’s homeworld.
“Teke, he’s terrified,” Cope said. “Look, let’s wait and set up the bio lock first.”
“If Nico’s going, I’m going!” Sock insisted.
Nico sighed hugely, too old to be handcuffed to a baby brother.
“Today he’s my son,” Teke reminded Cope firmly. “Always yours, and yours too, Ben.” Cope’s husband was Captain Ben Acosta, adoptive father to both boys. “But today he meets my world. My friends came to see you, Sock.”
Sock gulped and grasped Cope tighter. “You’ll protect me, Dad.”
“W
ell, Zan and Teke will protect both of us,” Cope hedged.
“And Wilder and me,” Ben insisted, checking his paired blasters. “We enjoy shooting things.” The captain and security goon traded a grin.
The door from the hold opened. Everyone in the narrow cargo lock squeezed sideways to make room for the latecomers. Cope was expecting Hugo Silva, software expert and envoy from Sanctuary. He hadn’t bargained on Kassidy Yang and her buzzing camera drones.
Kassidy flashed him a dazzling smile. “Videographer! For Hugo’s people back on Sanctuary. Show them what they’re signing up for on Denali.”
No one in their right mind would suggest the soft Sanks come here.
“Time,” Zan reported laconically. He hit the button to open the cargo door.
And Cope ran out of options. The moment the ramp cracked open, they were contaminated down to their hair follicles. “You’ll be OK!” he assured Sock. “Don’t leave my side, no matter what.”
“I know, Dad,” Sock insisted.
“Stay away from me and Teke,” Ben clarified. “We’re not safe at all.” As though to illustrate, he slipped out the side of the ramp before it reached the ground. Zan, Wilder, and Teke did the same. Judging by the cloud of swearing upon landing, Wilder forgot the 1.1 g gravity on this planet.
Sock let go of Cope to clap his hands to his ears.
Yeah, baby, the hull muffles the monster cries.
The outside air hit them like a blast furnace, over 50 degrees Celsius – or 125 Fahrenheit, in the archaic units favored by the locals. Organic smells seeped in despite the seal on Cope’s mask, rich and musty. The air was pregnant with smoke from their guns burning the jungle off the spaceport before they could touch down. Noon-like sun glared through pillars of steam from hot spots on the fused rock and soil. Cope narrowed his eyes. Some of those spots glowed cherry-hot.
The ramp clanked to the stone. Cope grabbed his sons’ hands and strode forth to meet a huddle of waiting hunters, faces garish in the living red, black, and yellow of their bakkra symbiotes. “Kassidy, you’ll watch Hugo?”
“Of course!” Kassidy claimed, still intent on her camera drone deployment. “I thought I remembered the heat.”
The Sanctuary emissary Hugo Silva stood transfixed, gaping at the hellish scene. Pterries dove and harassed each other, maddened by the sonic shield above. One dipped too low.
The hunters suddenly tackled their guests aside as a stunned behemoth crashed between the two starships, Prosper and Thrive. The monster thrashed feebly, a 7-meter wing flapping and sweeping at the ground, screaming agony as it touched dull red hot spots.
“It’s hurt, Daddy!” Sock whispered in anguish.
“Well, it’ll be dead soon,” Cope hazarded, though this wouldn’t comfort the child. Sure enough, Sock gazed up at him, brow crumpled as though betrayed. “Honey, pterries kill people. And they can break a starship.”
He hustled his kids to clear the thrash-zone with their guides. Kassidy dragged Hugo to catch up, until one of Thrive’s lesser guns had a clear kill shot. Gore splattered out, including a gob on Nico’s long pants. The pterry twitched and lay dead.
The hunter guides angrily barked at Thrive through their comms to finish the job. A bloody pterry carcass was worse than a live one. Others would swarm for a free lunch. The gun started up again to cremate the thing where it lay.
“Go!” the lead hunter demanded. He jogged to a couple of stakes in the ground which marked the exit through the invisible sonic barriers.
Trotting as ordered, Cope tried to explain the system to the boys. But they weren’t listening. He remembered well his own first steps into the Denali jungle, astonished and overwhelmed by the exuberant, hostile life crowding vast and aggressive all around him.
Nothing lived on their home moon Mahina unless a human put it there.
Denali was prettier during the polar winter night when he arrived. Not to mention cooler, a mere 30 degrees, or 90° F. Now the summer foliage was furled and ‘cocooned’ to protect tender living tissues from the killing heat of perpetual sun. Brown and yellow and purple seed pods hung like beaded beards from every corkscrewing, zig-zagging, and ferny branch. The underbrush appeared webbed over in thorny dead grass.
Alas, the predators didn’t hibernate in summer. A waist-high fanged ‘skunk’ hurled itself into the sonic corridor and fell twitching to block their path. A hunter lunged to gut it with a practiced swipe of a knife, then tossed it out, trailing brilliant scarlet blood. This excited a feeding frenzy as other animals rapidly converged to feast.
“Go, go, go!” the hunter screamed, as soon as the path was clear.
Cope hoofed it, dragging the boys. He quit worrying about anyone else. This was not the Waterfalls he remembered. He left here in summer. And the sonics controlled the voracious neighbors fine. But now they seemed less effective.
A hunter beckoned urgently from the sharp bend in the path, to the right with a sudden drop around an enormous tree. Cope remembered the landmark, where they clambered downhill on its roots like giant stairsteps.
Nico let go of Cope’s hand to run in front because the path narrowed. Three abreast brought the creepy leaf cocoons too close for comfort.
Just as the hunter ahead waved a swooping arm to demand they hurry up, a ‘jaguar’ pounced on him from behind, ripping his arm off. Cope and Sock stumbled into Nico’s suddenly frozen back.
The beast didn’t look like a jaguar, any more than the pterodactyl and skunk looked like their namesakes from Earth. Denali used Earth names to dub ‘similar’ wildlife. The beast was slow-slung, fast, and powerful, black with stripes of reddish purple.
The jaguar dropped the hunter’s detached arm as the man screamed in anguish. The monster switched to gnaw on his meatier shoulder. Cope’s Denali crewman Zan pushed him and his sons aside. He took a knee and aimed his blaster. His first shot exploded the hunter’s head, the second the jaguar’s. Then he ran forward to haul both bodies off the path before any more creatures could swarm in. Teke, Wilder, and Ben trotted by to help.
This was too much for Sock. He tried to bolt into the jungle, away from the carnage. He made it three steps straight into the sonics. He fell flat, with the barrier crossing his midsection. Cope hauled him back into the pathway, stunned and twitching. The moment the dad was sure the boy’s heart was still beating, he cradled him in his arms.
Nico tipped off his face mask to vomit by the side of the path. Cope barely managed to avoid doing the same, as Zan and Teke swung the dead hunter’s body into the grassy underbrush.
“Clear!” Zan called out. “Move it!”
Cope tugged Nico to close ranks with their protectors. He simply carried Sock. They navigated the tree-root spiral staircase OK. Three steps past the tree, a ‘giraffe’ muzzle dipped into the pathway, then shrieked in agony at the sonic barrier.
The 16-year-old wasn’t so grown-up now. Nico nearly knocked Cope over clutching him for safety.
“I need to be indoors now!” Cope demanded.
Zan glanced around in misgiving. But one of the other hunters, up on current conditions, barked, “Everyone jogs! Now!”
He led the way. Thoroughly spooked and pouring sweat, Kassidy and a sobbing Hugo kept up. Ben and Wilder dropped back to sandwich Cope and the boys as they ran steeply downhill.
In a few more minutes, they arrived at the roof of the bio lock, its heavy glass dome overgrown with vines. They piled in and down the spiral staircase into the airlock vestibule. After all the visitors cycled onward into breathable air, the hunter squad exited without a word, back outside to repair the dodgy sonic path defenses which cost them a man.
Cope collapsed to a bench, holding Sock tight. The others stripped and inserted clothing and gear into slots in the wall for separate cleaning.
