Migrant Thrive: Thrive Space Colony Adventures Box Set Books 7-9

by Ginger Booth

  Cope retaliated with finger-tips, touching dots above Ben’s eyebrows, on his nose and dimple spots. “Here, Sock, make a hand-print on our bellies.”

  The child felt self-conscious in a loincloth, patterned with orange-and-grey splotches on a pinkish background, with a fuzzy nap. Ben’s own blue-and-green mottled wrap bore a reptile texture, and Cope’s a flamboyant black zebra. They all felt rego awkward walking around in underwear.

  The men were still hairy compared to local cosmos, genetically bald all over. Ben opted to keep an inch of his head hair, well on its way to bleaching white from the tarry bakkra-cidal shampoo. Sass and Clay, transferred by tank from Thrive, still had their hair. Mercifully, Sass and Jules wrapped their chests. Jules insisted on their first trip here. Now many older Denali women wore halters as well as loincloths, though young women remained bare on top.

  “What does that do?” Nico asked. “One of the nurses held my face and kissed me on the way in.”

  “I ducked her,” Ben confided to his husband. “You?”

  “Absolutely,” Cope breathed. “You’ll see, Nico.”

  Ben resumed walking forward and tuned into Sass’s conversation with Gorey. “Only a hundred and ten thousand now?” she moaned. “In all of Denali? What happened?”

  “We’ve lost whole domes to the wildlife,” the Selectman explained. “A farm dome last year. Half the creche died.”

  “Is that where…?” Sass attempted tactfully.

  “A decade ago,” Gorey replied, with a dismissive wave of his good hand. “It’s the air conditioning. We stopped using it, adapted ourselves to the heat. But after Thrive, you left us your ship’s cooling systems. People thronged to the hospital to experience it, and demanded we adopt it again. But that vents heat to the air, you see. The wildlife swarm to the hot-spots. Sometimes they overwhelm our defenses.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sass sympathized. “The years haven’t been kind.”

  “They’ve been worse than unkind, Sass,” Gorey growled. “We must abandon this world. Find a new one. We thought we were doomed here. But Teke’s new warp drive changes everything.”

  Ben and Cope exchanged a look. Their entrepreneur-in-chief Abel hustled to flank the Selectman.

  “Like Sanctuary?” Abel prompted. “You want to relocate to another world?”

  “That’s only five thousand people,” Gorey differed. “They’re considering Mahina and Cantons. But what about Sylvan? An Earth-like world beckons, and they settle for a barren rock like Mahina? No offense. Or Cantons? You know nothing of Cantons.”

  “We’d be happy to act as your agent,” Abel offered. “We’re going that way, after all. No need to compete. Sanctuary has so few. They seek adoption into an existing community. Whereas Denali is a vibrant community.”

  “Dedicated to natural beauty,” Gorey countered. “Which rules out Mahina and Sagamore.”

  Ben snarled a silent raised lip at the back of the man’s head. Mahina was getting prettier, by the sweat of settlers’ backs. Cope looked even less impressed. At least we don’t have wildlife trying to kill us.

  Granted, Mahina’s atmosphere drops could do that. But a smart household sealed and pressurized before bed. Hardly anyone died of asphyxiation on Mahina anymore, a few hundred a year, far fewer than the radiation cancers.

  Abel continued his sales pitch. “Sanctuary has a ship big enough to carry them all at once. Without even cryo. It might take twenty trips for everyone on Denali. But if they let us lease their ship…”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Gorey confirmed. “Though a bigger ship would be better.”

  Cope and Ben traded silent high-fives.

  “What are you planning this time?” Gorey demanded. “A thousand Denali to Pono space. Aurora tells me the cryo death rate is 10-20% in these Sagamore…paddy wagons?” He spat the term in disgust.

  “That’s with Sagamore’s rough-and-ready cryo prep,” Abel allowed. “Sir, we can’t promise 100%. But we’ve had good initial results with cryo drugs combined with nanites. No deaths to date. Your first thousand will be our first test at scale. What I can tell you is that Aurora is like a tiger defending your world’s best interests. These concerns were factored into our deal.”

  “She’s a tiger alright,” Gorey acknowledged sourly. “Just take care of my people, won’t you?”

  Sass rested her fingers on his shoulder soothingly, pushing the chair with her palms. “You know us, Gorey. You can trust us to do our best.”

  He patted her hand. “Yes. I know that.”

  They arrived at the reception area, a large swath of empty dome. Ben got a better look at the dome above, grubby with organic debris. A white cloth canopy above blocked the sky and struggled to reflect away some of the relentless summer sun. Night wouldn’t return to the the polar region for a couple months.

  Teke raised an imperious finger to beckon them to join him. Ben wasn’t sure he was invited, but Cope grasped his hand.

  “Took you long enough,” Teke growled when they reached him. “Sora, this is my son, Socrates. The creche tells me I have a dozen. But this is the only one I know.”

  Ben’s eyes nearly crossed at the lack of tact. Sock’s crumpled brow turned to Cope, not Scholar Sora.

  “Different customs, Sock,” Cope gritted out. He jerked his head toward Sora and hinted. “Nice to…”

  “Nice to meet you, Scholar Sora,” Sock politely parroted on cue, ducking his head at the strange lady. Sora, alas, didn’t subscribe to the newfangled custom of binding her breasts. She dripped sweat over an unkempt spangling of lavender and navy bakkra with peach polka dots. Ben read the bakkra as denoting a cool temperament, with a slight touch of hallucinogenics. The child stared at her age-sagging chest instead of her clown-colored face. And who could blame him?

  “He’s very gifted,” Teke commented. “Instrumental in bringing down the AI on Sanctuary. With his half-brother, Nico. Cope is their common parent. You remember Cope and Ben?”

  Sora smirked at Cope’s bemused expression. “We collaborate by ansible, Teke.”

  “In silvery tones,” Ben quipped. The instantaneous ansible communicator displayed in low resolution with muted greys. “Good to see you in living color, Sora.”

  She barked a laugh. “Outlandish as our Denali colors may be.”

  Ben shrugged one shoulder. She lived in a bakkra-free lab when they first met, and wore a lab coat. Perhaps Denali should reconsider Mahina-style nanites to reverse the inroads of time.

  In response to some cue Ben missed, Sora and Teke hustled Cope to a raised dais. A geisha apprentice guided Ben and the boys to their place in the front row of onlookers. Denali natives never failed to impress with their cooperative skills. The crowd formed quietly, ready for the festivities to commence.

  Gorey gave a fulsome greeting to their returning envoys Zan, Reza, and Aurora. Ben’s gardener, the Denali farmer Quire, declined to attend, but the Selectman put a recent image of him on a display screen propped on a chair. Ben would shuttle Quire home for a visit to his home farm domes in Hermitage tomorrow.

  Zan and Reza, hunter and cosmo technician, nodded their heads in acknowledgment. Aurora led the hall in a meditation. Then she gave a brief speech reviewing Denali’s impact on the Pono worlds.

  The crowd liked that.

  This naturally led to the crowning achievement of Teke and Cope in discovering the gateway warp, and proving it out. The Denali crowd applauded Cope’s achievement above Teke’s. Here they valued overcoming practical challenge over mere ideas.

  The next phase of the ceremony featured scholar and hunter, farmer and cosmo each reflecting on the import of the new warp gateway from their faction’s perspective. Ben wryly noted that not even scholar Sora tried to explain how it worked – no one wanted a physics lecture.

  In stark contrast, the faculty at Mahina University practically threw rotten tomatoes at Teke and Cope when they declined to present the mathematics and key enabling technology at the heart of their invention. Denali took
education seriously. But their best and brightest were generalists and dilettantes by MU standards.

  The farmer representative called Ben and Elise forward for a bow as Cope and Teke’s second-tier collaborators. Sock waved as she introduced him as Teke’s son. The Denali clapped politely, unsure what to make of that twist. Parentage was a private matter.

  Ben smiled at Sock and assured him he did great. Nico stayed put. Cope’s son was irrelevant today.

  Last, Aurora took a turn again. The crowd hushed breathless as she presented how Spaceways would use the gateway to resettle Sanctuary to a new world.

  And she showed them pictures of the virgin Earth-like world of Sylvan. Ben glanced uneasily around a sea of rapturous upturned Denali faces.

  “And this is why we now take a thousand of our people to Pono space. To master the skills and amass the wealth. It cannot happen this year, nor next. But this prize world of Sylvan shall be claimed by someone. Let it be us.”

  Aurora in her still-pale bakkra closed with an elegant geisha bow, fingers steepled prayerfully, to thunderous acclaim.

  Nico whispered in Ben’s ear, “Did Aurora just upstage Teke?”

  Ben chuckled. “She sure did.” He glanced back at Kassidy. Sure enough, their lady of the media caught it all for broadcast.

  7

  Ben escaped the reception to show the boys around the cosmo dome. They walked the special galleries where the hunter and farmer domes ran close enough to visit without crossing bio containment. They peeked through the sun shades at the magnificent rainbow-shrouded waterfalls, hundreds of meters high in dozens of interlocking cascades. An hour later, Ben found the overview spot above the tall forests. But the sun was blotted out by a massive thunderstorm, raining in sheets with stunning lightning.

  Mahina had little patches of woods. But the boys had never seen the awe-inspiring spectacle of water pouring from the sky, let alone dramatic clouds and lightning.

  Sock found three species of singing bug, and two unfamiliar frogs. He was enchanted. He never realized there was more than one kind.

  They ended at the salt bathing grotto, where swimming skill was redundant. They couldn’t sink if they tried.

  Confident that his charges were safe and having fun, Ben lay back and effortlessly floated in the body-warm pool. He could hardly feel where the water left off and humid hot air began. He remembered his first time in this magical city with a private smile, breaking through their reserve at last to fall in love with Cope. The exotic smells and colors and tastes, everything rendered even more vivid by new romance, all enhanced by the mildly hallucinogenic peach bakkra.

  He wondered if he could replicate this womb-like peace with a personal grav generator and a steamy bathroom. No water pressure. Hm.

  Nico and Sock pounced to rouse him from his reverie, though they failed to dunk him. Nico announced, “Dad! I’m going to go find guys my age.”

  “Girls?” Ben suggested with a smile. Nico shrugged a bashful maybe. “Have fun. Don’t annoy people. Be at the new ship bio-lock by 10:00 hours.”

  Nico’s eyebrows soared. He waded away as fast as the super-saturated water would allow before Ben could change his mind. That wasn’t very fast.

  “Just you and me, Sock!” Ben encouraged. “For a little while.”

  “You’re a fun dad,” Sock replied, as though surprised.

  “Hm. Sorry we don’t get to play more often, champ. But now you’ve seen my real world. I work a lot. I love spending time with you. But you’ll stay behind on Mahina when we leave for Sanctuary. Right?” He briefly considered reminding the boy of his horrifying scurry through the jungle. But he judged there was no need to hammer that point home.

  So far Ben had visited three strange worlds, not counting the space platforms. Denali and Sagamore were even in his home system. He couldn’t begin to guess what challenges Cantons had in store. But their track record so far was rego unpromising. More ways to die, at the hands of people we don’t understand.

  “I’ll stay home,” Sock promised. “But I wish you or Dad could stay with me.”

  “I know. But we’ll be back. Even if something goes wrong and we’re late. We’d never give up trying to get home to you. We know this for sure. We’ve done it before.” He grinned to take the sting out of the statement.

  “Is Nico going?”

  “Dad and Nico are still negotiating. But you gotta let him go, Sock. Nico’s a grown-up. You wouldn’t go with him on a date, right? Or to work at the Schuyler Docks?”

  Sock apparently deemed the conversation over. He resumed trying to dive into a float-only pool. Some of the teenagers managed with a pencil dive. Ben figured Sock lacked the mass to break through the surface tension. But explaining the science to him would just wreck his fun. Besides, sometimes he nearly walked on water for a step or two.

  Eventually Cope and Teke caught up with them. Cope waded right in, and immediately splashed head and face to starting killing off his bakkra. The microbes aren’t crawling on you, Cope. That insidious thought made his skin itch.

  “Proud of you guys!” Ben hailed them. “I trust you feel thoroughly celebrated.”

  “Very much so.” But Teke sounded subdued. His eyes rested on Sock. The boy was talking to other kids for a change.

  “The MU party was more fun for me,” Cope confided. “More friends and colleagues. Although! Sass and I ran into the cosmo techs we worked with last time. She tried to hire them to help with our bio-locks. She hinted this was our second honeymoon.”

  Teke snickered. “Then Aurora butted in and gave details of how you two coupled here for the first time when arriving at Waterfalls.”

  “What kind of details?” Ben growled.

  “You know Aurora.” Cope wiped his cheeks, which needed no bakkra to flush redder. “She left something to the imagination. Then made sure imagination supplied the right postures.”

  “Oy!”

  “So then the techs wouldn’t dream of charging us. They already left to help Remi rig the locks.”

  Ben beamed back into Cope’s shining eyes. His husband was really touched by the gesture, that these old local hires would drop everything to give them a night off together. They only won this brief interlude to attend the ceremony courtesy of Waterfalls hunters taking a turn to transport the arriving cargo containers away.

  “And I’ve got Sock,” Teke told him. “Don’t worry, Cope, I won’t get him killed. See you at the bio-locks in the morning.”

  Ben asked Cope, “We aren’t considering leaving Sock here. Right?” Ben was Sock’s other legal parent, not Teke. Only recently had the physicist taken an interest.

  “Absolutely not,” Cope confirmed. “Stay if you want, Teke. You’d see us again. Can’t say when.”

  Teke shook his head slightly. “When you take Quire to Hermitage, Ben. Sora and I would appreciate a lift to Denali Prime. But then I’m going home. To Mahina Actual.” His gaze on the child slowly turned to a nod. “I think I’ll stay there. You don’t need me for Cantons. When you head to Sylvan, I’ll be right there with you.”

  Cope met his eye and smiled. “Maybe by then, Sock and Fraz will be old enough to go with us.”

  “Either way.” Teke bopped both their shoulders with a fist in parting. He waded off to tell Sock he was with Dad-T for the night.

  Sock naturally fled back to hug Cope hard, and give Ben a shy squeeze as well. “Don’t do anything gross.”

  “I won’t!” Ben vowed solemnly. Cope shook his head virtuously as well.

  When Teke drew Sock far enough away, Ben leaned in to whisper, “Kinda makes you want to get busy ASAP.” He pulled away. “Though I feel guilty sticking Remi with building the bio-locks.”

  “I left him instructions.”

  Ben laughed out loud. “Do you remember building our first bio-lock?”

  “He’s very talented. And Sass recruited helpers.”

  Ben’s smile began to ache. “Is Teke really leaving with us?”

  “I don’t know. He’s
more patriot than he thinks. He loves this world.”

  The couple only got the one night alone together, but Ben and Cope made it count for a romantic second honeymoon in the exotic city by the rainbow falls.

  Then it was time for them to begin work in earnest. A thousand people weren’t about to fly into orbit, decontaminate the bakkra, and stow themselves into Saggy cryo containers. Let alone the rest of the cargo – and no telling what that might be. Abel had barely begun to haggle.

  8

  After a terror run through the pseudo-pterodactyls and a towering thunderstorm, Ben settled the shuttle outside the imposing entrance to Hermitage. This was Denali’s largest surviving city when last he was here. The towering facade in the side of a mountain reminded him of those old Lord of the Rings movies. He took a couple deep breaths of relief and wiped the sweat from his palms. He and his gunner, the Denali-born hunter Zan, traded raised eyebrows.

  They were aghast at the pterry problem compared to when last they flew from Waterfalls. Part of that was understandable. In aid of the Denali Prime evacuation, hunters led by Selectman Gorey worked tirelessly to thin the avian hordes. But Zan claimed he’d never seen them this bad.

  Heat, Aurora shared, as they shuffled through decontamination this morning on the way home to the ships. Waterfalls expanded their air conditioning out of necessity, not for comfort. The planet had entered a warming phase. Their diminished ranks of scientists knew that Denali had been hotter still in the past. They couldn’t say when this particular spell would end, or how hot it would get.

  They abandoned the undersea city of Neptune. Warm waters with altered chemistry began to corrode the mortar holding their leaking dome together. Neptunians hated the hot life in Waterfalls, and thronged the ranks of emigrants Ben would carry back to the Pono rings. Insane as it seemed to re-settle in the volcanic ash of Denali Prime, that’s exactly what they’d done. Only three settlements remained on the planet.