by Ginger Booth
Including Ben’s least favorite. He sighed, then called out brightly, “First stop, Hermitage! Quire, have a great visit!”
He looked back at his standing-room-only throng in Thrive’s shuttle. This bird only sat eight. He’d only meant to ferry Quire home to visit Hermitage, plus Teke and Sora to Prime. His son Socrates spent the bright night half-awake with nightmares. The child was stuck with Dad-B now because Cope was working with power tools outdoors today. Nico assisted on that team, heavily guarded by hunters.
Ben needed Zan to fire the guns while he dodged at the helm. Or rather, he expected the defrocked urb cop Wilder to shoot things. He expected Zan to enjoy a reunion with his long-parted hunter guild at Waterfalls.
Zan didn’t want to talk about it.
Then Aurora and Hugo, Kassidy and Eli showed up this morning too, to pass through the expanded bio-locks with Ben and Cope. They insisted they needed to visit Prime. Sock and Kassidy stood in the aisle.
Rather, Kassidy hung on the backs of Ben and Zan’s seats, sharing the cameras. Fourteen years ago, her viewers hung spellbound on her coverage of the dramatic rescue of Denali Prime. They’d eat this up, the Thrive team’s triumphant return to Denali and – surprise! – the rebirth of Prime.
Quire didn’t rise to disembark. Ben’s eyes narrowed, and he unbelted himself to budge Quire out of his seat.
“I’ve changed my mind.” The normally Buddha-like farmer hyperventilated, showing the whites of his eyes and a flush.
Ben was used to this. Quire had tended his shipboard gardens for years. “We’re just going to the airlock to talk for a minute.”
He drew the panicky Quire and his modest bag of Mahina souvenirs into the tiny vestibule for privacy, and sealed them in. “Quire, you have to. You’ve come so far. You’d regret it if you didn’t visit your old friends. You have people here who care about you.”
“I do not.” An eye tick joined his panic attack symptoms. His breathing grew more ragged. “Ben, do you know how many Hermitage will send to Mahina?”
The captain shrugged. “Figured a third. But then, I thought we had a different three cities, so what do I know? Did Aurora warn you how things had changed here?”
Ben felt the envoy could have been more forthcoming about what conditions they were flying into. But if they knew the planet offered new complications, Spaceways might have postponed Denali until after their commitment to escort the Sanks to Cantons. So he supposed he couldn’t blame her for misleading them. Aurora had tried to cajole him into this trip for a decade.
The farmer shook his head jerkily. “She didn’t tell us either. Hermitage will send no one to Mahina. They know Aurora hopes to resettle Denali to Sylvan. They’re dead set against it. Hermitage won’t leave. Isolationists flocked here. Anyone open-minded fled to Prime or Waterfalls.”
This was news to Ben. He’d never liked Hermitage. Perhaps he held a grudge. But right now, he didn’t understand. “Are you saying your friends –” Denali didn’t acknowledge family as such, “– your creche-mates moved elsewhere?”
“No, Ben. They’re here.” Quire gulped.
Oh. “Are you afraid they might…?” Lock you in a dungeon with necrotic bakkra? That’s what Hermitage did to Ben and Cope their first and only visit to the city. Ben briefly considered offering Zan to go in for moral support. But he couldn’t spare Zan at the guns. Was he with us that time? No, that was their other hunter, Kaz. Ben had looked forward to seeing him again. But Kaz died young. Hunters often did.
“They might hold me hostage,” Quire allowed. “But more likely… Ben, they’ll shun me. For having gone to Mahina and stayed so long. Anyone still here is dead-set against any future but the glory of Denali.”
Ben nodded slowly and met his eye in a gentle challenge. “Maybe you could change that. Not confront them. But add a little vector in their thinking. Speak your truth, and your experience.”
Granted, Quire didn’t like Mahina. He lived on Prosper. If he lost a place on Ben’s ship, he’d find a hydroponics job on the space platforms.
Maybe Quire was thinking the same thing. He broke his gaze and looked away, eyes brimming with humiliation. “I am ashamed.”
Ben was floored. “Is there someone waiting to meet you?”
“No one. I called.”
Oh. Ben gathered his friend into a warm hug. “Do you want to visit Prime?” he murmured. “Waterfalls? Or just go home to Prosper.”
“I feel so useless!” The farmer, much bigger than the captain, sobbed into his shoulder.
“You could watch Sock,” Ben offered.
Teke offered to take the boy to Prime. The Denali creches wasted no time in cranking out new little baby academics, many around Sock’s age, to replace the lost generations of Prime. Young hunters studied with them, at Prime, Ben was incredulous to learn.
Wasn’t getting wiped out by volcanoes enough the first time?
But by the same token, the Denali lost so much in that debacle that they couldn’t afford to abandon the city. In the bio-lock showers, Sora explained that the volcanic ash, sealed as concrete, reflected the brutal sun wonderfully. The murderous wildlife hated the blinding white plain where nothing grew. Teke looked haunted by this description. By all accounts, the Denali Prime of his childhood, ringed by majestic volcano cones and particolored forests, was once stunningly beautiful.
“I could face Prime,” Quire decided in a rush. “Go with Teke.” He gulped.
Ben patted his back in encouragement. “Face your fears together. Right? OK, if you’re sure. Um…Zan and the others?”
Quire shook his head. “None of us are welcome back. Only Teke.”
Wow. Hell of a homecoming.
Ben led them back into the cabin and took his seat. “Next stop Denali Prime.”
“Through the thunderstorm,” Zan advised, pointing to blackening mountains in the sky, replete with lighting. The shuttle sat in blinding sun. But yes, that monstrous storm was between here and Prime.
Ben pursed his lips. He could wait it out. The storms moved around a fair bit. He feared the sudden elevator lurches when flying through the dratted things, struggling to avoid the mountain peaks and pterries. But he saw Zan’s point. The downdrafts screwed with the pterry agility to attack them.
He traced a path through the massifs into his navigation, then leapt into the sky. Now that he was committed, the pilot gloried in the wildness. The first curtain of rain slashed at them as the wicked sun vanished. Lightning bolts bounced through rents in dark clouds ten kilometers tall, thunder shaking the vessel simultaneously. Zan added laser beam blasts to the light show, shooting at pterries. One of the blimp creatures exploded into a brilliant fireball as Ben struggled with the helm to flee a violent downdraft.
Wind and roiling sky, slashing rain and lightning, and deafening thunder. No past, no future, no kids with nightmares or self-conscious about a new bra. Ben exulted in the now in sheer joy, a contest of wills between himself and nature at its most powerful. The shuttle bounded like a pogo stick through the tempest.
And they flew out the other side, nearly blinded by the sudden onslaught of sun and rainbows as the display screen lagged to adjust.
“Dammit!” Eyes dazzled, Zan was slow on the uptake. A pterry swooped within 50 meters before he fired at it. Ben swerved the shuttle, making his shot miss. But the hunter got the beast on his third shot, plus its buddy hanging above. And two more giant raptors fell to smash on the ash-covered slopes below.
And they emerged above glittering Prime. Sora was right. The pterries cleared out, granting Ben clear flying to the dome she requested.
The concrete landscape wasn’t entirely featureless. They graded the ash into long swoops like the Sahara sand dunes of old, rendered in blinding white. Shining glass brick peeked out of domes left half-buried for insulation. Here and there, room-sized plantings of native trees and flowers broke up the view.
“Don’t fly over the –” Sora belatedly mentioned.
BOOM!
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nbsp; Half-stunned by the sonic blast, and his navigational computer temporarily stunned as well, Ben pulled the shuttle out of a crazy horizontal spin and came to a hovering halt in mid-air. He blew out to calm his pounding heart. “Over the what?”
“The planters,” Sora explained apologetically. “They have sonics for protection. To them, your shuttle must seem like a pseudo-pterodactyl. We should fix that.”
“Good to know.” At half the speed he’d normally use, to give his frayed nerves a break, Ben brought them to the target dome and set down soft as a flower petal. Like Hermitage, the dome offered no bio-lock he could mate to.
“Sock, I have a surprise for you,” Teke piped up.
Just what I needed, Ben thought crankily. Another surprise.
But he turned in his seat to watch as Teke produced a smoky-clear wad of plastic from his duffel bag. “We wear these to play a game outdoors early in our hunter training. See, instead of a breath mask, you get inflated inside a giant ball of air. Your legs stick out here. Then we bounce off each other. I’ve got an extra, if you’d like, Kassidy. The rest of us are too big for them.”
Kassidy laughed in delight. She started pulling the offered ‘ball’ up her legs alongside Sock. There wasn’t room to navigate the shuttle air-lock with the things inflated. But Teke demonstrated with just enough air to tide them over until they were outside. The shuttle supplied extra air canisters. A trio of hunters exited the dome to provide escort. Teke, plastered to the bulkhead, exited first with his pair of inflatable soccer balls with feet.
After they inflated fully, Kassidy and Sock started ramming into each other. They’d bounce off and roll, their legs scrambling for purchase. Judging by Sock’s squinting, the darkened plastic barely kept the powerful sun out of his eyes. Judging by his ear-to-ear grin, he loved it! Kassidy’s inevitable camera drones swooped and frolicked between them for the view. The guards and Teke donated kicks to keep them from rolling out of their protection. Teke even got a volley going with a hunter. They kicked Sock back and forth a few times while the rest geared up and exited the shuttle.
Quire, last to disappear into the dome, shot Ben a reassuring thumbs-up.
He made a mental note to buy 50 of those ball outfits for the kids. That game would be a big hit on Mahina. He revised his order upward – the Sank kids would love it, too, and maybe Cantons as well.
9
Jules Greer, apartment rental czarina of Schuyler City on Mahina, strolled down the main cosmo dome in Waterfalls, husband at her side. Abel was deep into his pocket comm again as she admired the ingenuity and variety of open-air partitions the locals used to stake their claim to scraps of floor space within the giant oblong dome. The cosmos considered it rude to raise their voices, and the constant breeze from massive fans muted the noise. But the murmur of thousands still suffused the dome with a mood.
Yesterday’s mood felt resolute, nearly militant, after Aurora’s clarion call to Sylvan. Today’s underlying grumble seemed tinged with sadness. A thousand emigrants, most from here, is a lot. Waterfalls with its Neptune newcomers would supply 80% of the travelers. Everyone knew someone who was leaving, perhaps never to return.
“Inflatable soccer ball suits,” Abel murmured. He showed her a game between Sock and Kassidy before the entrance to a dome surrounded in white.
Jules clapped her hands in glee. “Samples, one hundred. But make them clear. Mahinans play on weekends.” The sun stayed below the horizon during Mahina weekend.
“Ben wants hundreds. For the kids’ creches, plus goodwill gifts for the Sanks and Cantons.”
Jules shrugged. “It’s a good idea for marketing. And we can manufacture more on Mahina. But it’s a toy. Cheap knockoffs are easy. Not worth the fuel to lift to orbit. I say 150 max.”
“Done. What’s this next appointment?” Abel looked up to take in their surroundings. “Oh, no.”
Jules grinned. “Yes! Back to the farm dome again!” She gave in and cut her hair to an inch long, following Sass and Kassidy’s lead. Her first pass through the bio-locks took that inch from muddy brown to dark honey blond. They’d been through twice since for meetings in the farm tunnel, leaving her platinum blond. This pass should wring out every last drop of color. Gangly tall compared to her husband and the well-knit Denali, and mortified by the halter and loincloth instead of her usual chin-to-toe modest clothes, she fought herself not to hug arms to chest and crotch.
Half an hour later, her cropped hair snowy white, a gracious older farmer met them, her breasts mercifully bound by new custom. The woman, Aldi, led them to a spread of tatami mats woven from something indigo, and bade them sit on scanty cushions.
“Our product to demonstrate today,” Aldi explained, eyes glowing with hope, “is chocolate.”
Jules and Abel exchanged a glance. “What about it?” Jules asked. Chocolate flavor came standard on Mahina food printers. She used it in ice cream and cake batter.
Aldi, who’d been kneeling, fell back onto her heels aghast. “We were sure you could not grow chocolate on Mahina! We spent so long developing the crop…” She sadly poured them little demitasse cups of dark brown anyway.
“What do you mean, grow chocolate?” Abel asked. “It’s a flavor.”
Like most flavors, it came from a chemical vat. He double-checked this point on his pocket tablet and shared the result with Jules. Manufactured in their own city of Schuyler, only a few klicks from their mansion. No wonder the wind smelled so bad from that direction.
“You make artificial flavors,” Aldi suggested, looking as though she dared to hope again. “This is real chocolate, the original. Taste. Please.”
Jules skeptically took a chalky, bitter sip of the dark brew, and puckered. “Needs syrup.” Aldi hadn’t put any sweetener in it. This stuff was worse than coffee.
“Syrup? Oh, you mean honey? Or sugar?” Aldi seemed puzzled. “Sugar is bad for – Of course. I’ll get some.”
Jules shrugged. Mahina wasn’t a large enough world to support much variety. They grew corn. They sucked the sweetness out for syrup, ground some for corn meal, and fed the dross to the pigs. Jules should know. Her Da raised pigs. Ornery creatures. Da didn’t believe in gravity for livestock, so the hogs Jules grew up around were spindly-legged, about waist-high.
Abel shook his head. “It’s a shame they want to push food on us. The economics never work.”
Aldi heard that last as she returned with a bowl of tiny white crystals like salt. “But we can sell it very compact. See?” She opened a lidded bowl of powdered brown bitterness. Jules tested a bit with a dampened chopstick. Their thoughtful host provided a dozen of the pretty sticks, unaware that Mahinans favored knives and sporks.
Aldi used a small flat spatula where Jules would have chosen a measuring spoon. She transfered equal parts of brown dust and white crystals into another dainty cup, then stirred in the room-temperature water.
Jules sipped it, not expecting much. But the flavor exploded on her tongue, bitter and sweet together. “Cream. I bet if you warmed this, with cream?” She handed her sample to Abel to try.
Denali didn’t eat food hot. Desperate, Aldi attempted, “We make it into special cakes at Christmas. Treats for the children.” She scampered off again to retrieve little bars of the same dark brown, rendered glossy and smooth but nearly black.
Jules bit into it. The outer ‘chocolate’ was still a touch bitter for her taste, not sweet enough. But combined with the sugary cream interior, the flavor was divine. She didn’t offer Abel a taste this time. He grabbed his own.
“Most women love it,” Aldi entreated them.
Jules’ brows raised half up her forehead as she nodded. “Mix the cream. Into the chocolate. With the sugar. Then make it all glossy like that. That’s divine.”
Abel wasn’t impressed. “It still isn’t cost-effective to lift foodstuffs out of the gravity well and carry them to another world.”
“Abel, you’re wrong,” Jules informed him. “We just need a little product developme
nt here. Adjust the flavor to Mahina tastes. We have cream and corn syrup. Though that white stuff is very tasty. It’s the brown powder we ship. Plus a few hundred kilos of these…treats?”
“Candies. Sometimes we dip orange peel in chocolate. Or fresh fruit, but those won’t keep. I can show you many different candies.”
“Yes, bring them to me. All kinds,” Jules encouraged. She tapped the table with a fingertip. “Only sweet ones. The unsweetened stuff is terrible.”
“Before you go, Aldi,” Abel interrupted. “How much is available? Could you provide a few hundred kilos of,” he pointed to the prepared chocolates, “and a few cubic meters of,” he pointed to the brown powder. But Denali used feet, not meters. “Say 100 cubic feet?”
“So much…” Aldi whispered in amazement. “I can ask.” With many apologies for taking up so much of the traders’ precious time, she rushed off again, this time for much longer to collect answers and bonbons.
“Does it really taste that different from the chemical plant stuff?” Abel asked, biting into another one.
“It’s more than flavor, Abel. Trust me on this. It makes me feel good. Like their new enhanced Joy pills – Neutral Joy, Mental Rest, and the like.”
Based on the enthusiastic Mahina reception to their Farmer Joy formulation, Waterfalls pharmacists had been busy concocting new blends of their gut bacteria. The new base product, Happy Tummy, was psychoactively neutral, but enhanced the immune system and fended off the tendency to middle-aged tummy bulge. They might have formulated Engineer’s Joy with John Copeland in mind, the same Farmer Joy calm and happy, but with enhancements to focus, IQ, and a little zing toward creative insight. Jules herself was a new devotee of Healer’s Joy, which enhanced empathy and emotional toughness while maintaining sharp mental clarity.
She’d picked up Mental Rest for Quire to test if he was willing. One dose softened focus instead of sharpening it, with effects building and easing off over a couple weeks, a perfect reprieve for those struggling with phobias. She wouldn’t try it now, of course, but she also bought Lover’s Joy. A couple were supposed to take it for a lovemaking marathon to enhance a mating bond. Jules was suspicious about that one, given that most Denali didn’t marry.
