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

by Ginger Booth

  “No.”

  “Cool. Be that way.” She brought up her flight plan and confirmed he mirrored it as copilot. “Sylvan, here we come in 10, 9, 8.” True to Mahina form, she didn’t complete the countdown aloud – that added unnecessary stress. The timer finished, and her programmed navigation took over, smoothly parting ways with Merchant and Sardine.

  Unlike the lightweight moons of Pono, Sylvan took some time on approach, owing to its 0.9-odd gravity. Somewhat larger than Earth, the planet’s lower gravity presumably promised a lower metal content.

  The gorgeous planet sure did look like Earth, though, at least during one of the great Ice Ages. Of 180 degrees of latitude, only 60 peeked between Sylvan’s immense frozen ice caps. That still left about half the planet thawed. Snowfall was common in its narrow temperate zone tucked below the glaciers. That’s where they were headed. Having struggled with brutal heat for the past century on the Denali north pole, the colonists fancied a cold season.

  The oceans – the thawed part – shone vivid blue, the continents mostly a deep dark green, all swathed in white cotton candy clouds. Of all the planets found since humanity stepped off the homeworld, Sylvan was the prize, the jewel, an Earth-like planet at last. Not that they’d be able to breathe the air. Its oxygen content was too high, along with a few pesky trace ingredients.

  First planet in Sass’s life with too much oxygen!

  They’d studied the place from orbit for a couple days. Ben urged the founding cabal to study longer. But their observations from orbit corroborated the good news the wildcatters brought back to Sanctuary after they discovered Sylvan. For details, they needed to get down there.

  Tarana, leader of the Denali expedition, had a motto: Fail fast!

  Sass understood the logic: take risks and learn in a hurry. Tarana’s people couldn’t wait to escape Sardine. And all too soon, Spaceways would require them to unload, so the ships could fly away to cart other immigrants. The longer the Denali had on the surface to establish their beachhead before Ben and Sass abandoned them, the better.

  The captain wished Tarana would phrase it differently, though.

  Her ship began to bite into the atmosphere, trailing hot streamers behind them. The sky began to lighten from the black of space to darkest blue, then brightening cobalt. Sass’s heart exulted to see blue sky above for the first time since childhood.

  Like Earth, the atmosphere thickened. The streamers turned into a fireball pouring from her bow as her ship air-braked to shed the enormous orbital velocity. They dipped across the terminator, a flaming meteor in the night.

  Sass rested her fingers on her controls and kept a wary eye out. Thrive was rocking and bobbing in turbulence like a wild thing. But nothing exceeded the limits of her inertial dampeners yet.

  “Cyclone,” Zan warned her.

  She calmly veered around it. They were now low enough to pass through instead of over the storm. “That came up fast.” She’d checked the weather on her last orbital pass, of course, and plotted her course around a different hurricane.

  “Another!” Zan called out.

  Sass veered again. The two storms in such close proximity had a towering thunderstorm system trapped between them. That passage got rather bouncy. Kassidy Yang, recording the landing for posterity and current income, lamented that a lightning bolt zapped one of the external cameras. The engineers promised to fix it some other time.

  And in another moment, they were out, flying into sunrise. Then a snowstorm at this altitude, then back into sun. For the next cloud, they were low enough to catch streaming water. This wasn’t a big deal for the Denali contingent. It rained often in their steamy jungles. But no rain had ever fallen on Mahina.

  And they were out, far lower. In fact, a little lower than Sass preferred with all the mountains ringing the proposed first city. She pulled up and finished bleeding off speed on manual. Then she arced in, spiraling down to Sylvan One, a hypothetical spot on a map and a gleam in Tarana’s eye.

  The landscape was stunning. The edge of the ice pack shone brilliant white and blue behind purple snowcapped mountains, peaking above dark green and red forests. She wheeled over a vast melt lake in glacier turquoise which deepened to azure and midnight blue. She banked over the rolling forested hills and returned to the lake to follow an exiting ribbon of river.

  Odd that this river, so broad and deep and clear, had no banks. She considered asking, but surely the Denali geologists knew their stuff.

  And there it was! Their founding city-to-be looked a lot like all the other woods for the moment, perhaps shorter, but her way marker was clear. She brought Thrive to hover 100 meters above.

  “Now I insist you do the honors,” she told Zan. “Try a weak beam to start.” She flipped the all-hands comms on. “People! We have arrived, and are about to begin clearing our first spaceport! Because we can’t land on a tree. Captain out.”

  Zan studied the lay of the land, to the extent they could see it. The sonic returns were iffy on the topography. Sass pursed her lips and let him think it through. Denali’s planet, after all.

  Apparently he came to the wrong conclusion. He targeted the highest tree in the target zone. And he shot at its base with 10% power on the main asteroid-killing plasma gun. Sass’s jaw dropped.

  Humans couldn’t breathe Sylvan’s air. The high oxygen level could cause brain damage. But oh, it made for an exuberant fire! The 40-meter tree practically exploded into flames nearly reaching her ship. The captain shot the younger man a glare, and shifted Thrive 20 meters up and 100 meters east from the bonfire, upwind from its spume of smoke.

  As the neighboring trees also exploded into fire, she shifted Thrive to wait over the river. “My guns from now on, Zan.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I said minimum fire,” she groused. “Why didn’t you use the small laser?”

  “Drama.”

  Sass shook her head in disbelief. A Mahinan, she might expect to start a forest fire by accident. But a Denali? They lived in a rain forest! They even mined minerals by burning their bizarre trees to glass. Hunters burned forest every day, the only way to keep a path open. “You fly the shuttle for defense. Get going the minute we land, before I offload the riders. But rego hell, Zan, don’t set any more trees ablaze!”

  “Aye.”

  As the conflagration spread, Darren and Cope called with a plan. They could use the grav grapples to collect water from the river and dump it to wet a perimeter around the wildfire. Failing that, at least they could cool the ground already burnt. Cope called her a dumbass once or twice. Sass silently congratulated herself for not blaming her copilot. As commander, she was responsible for Captain Zan’s stupidity, too.

  The Denali wisely decamped to the shuttle while Sass and the engineers battled the blaze.

  An hour later, she set Thrive down on a boggy stretch of charcoal. She gazed around, enraptured.

  She hadn’t expected to fall in love. Sylvan was Earth, pristine and new.

  2

  Staffing had been problematic for this jaunt. Three weeks ago, Sass sat in her office in Thrive, pouring through a mountain of paperwork to get this circus underway to Sylvan. She and Ben and Zan had been flying nonstop this past year, ferrying immigrants and running freight. By rights, all three should take a well-earned vacation.

  But instead they’d agreed to squeeze in the Sylvan expedition, practically pro bono. Fitting all the trappings to found a new colony into a few containers and two holds was no mean feat. And then there was the crew challenge. Oddly, many Spaceways employees objected to dangerous work for free. Some, like their Sagamore-born Remi Roy, objected to the mission. That one hurt. Good space engineers didn’t pop out of vacuum. And they most emphatically did not work for free.

  A strange whir-and-click came from the corridor. Her door stood open, as usual when she was in home port at Mahina Orbital. No doubt it was another shipment of camping supplies being jockeyed into place. Clay’s problem.

  But no, it proved to be
hers. “Hey, Tante Sass!”

  She looked up to see Nico Copeland, Cope and Ben’s eldest, peering around her doorframe with a bright hopeful smile. Once upon a time, she met baby Nico before the elder Copeland, or even Ben. The child had been turning slightly blue, parked in a stroller in a phosphate mine. His color was much better now at 21. She bounded from her chair in delight and made to hug him.

  And she stopped. He had an electric emu in tow, like the ride-ons they brought to the European city-states of Cantons. Except this one was smaller or it wouldn’t fit through her doorway. The Sanctuary electric horses, emus, and especially the three-wheelers proved a big hit on Mahina. The Sanctuary deadbeats seemed to keep getting richer off the AI Loki’s productivity, while the fiercely capable Denali bankrupted themselves on dreams of Sylvan.

  “I guess your dads don’t charge you for shipping toys, huh?” she quipped. “Those aren’t as popular in the rings.” She followed through with the warm hug and a kiss on his cheek.

  “No, Sass, this isn’t –” Nico began, then switched course. “Sass, we’re here to apply for a job. Um, two jobs. Me and Floki.”

  “Floki!” she echoed, turning to regard the emu’s enormous artificial eyes in alarm. “This is… Bloki, riding an emu?”

  The system AI who controlled Sanctuary, the Shiva that tortured and killed her time after time, had become Loki. Then Nico instantiated him as Bloki and smuggled him aboard for the trip to Cantons. By mutual consent after that voyage, beloved Nico Copeland was evicted from the Spaceways fleet and sentenced to university. Sass saw him at family parties. He continued studying artificial intelligence. But she could steer the affable young man into more neutral conversation.

  “I’m an instance of Bloki,” the bird replied. “I specialize in the individual experience, including sensory and ambulatory independence. We’d like to join your ship for Sylvan.”

  “Dad said no,” Nico murmured. “But you could hire us! Floki identifies as a reincarnation of Lief Greenwald.”

  Greenwald was the wildcatter captain who discovered Sylvan years ago. The planet exploration was cut short when the wildlife nearly killed him. He and a couple others made it back to Sanctuary with their precious news of an Earth-like planet. They passed away years before Sass reached Sanctuary. But Loki concocted his whole persona around Greenwald, seeking to be maximally appealing to one Sassafras Collier, the better to lie to her.

  Loki, and all instances of Loki, remained banned from Thrive Spaceways ships. Aside from the one test subject, Bloki, they were banned from the entire Aloha system by virtue of the fact that Spaceways refused to carry them. Their warp gateway technology was a closely held trade secret. Spaceways was the only interstellar transport available.

  Sass huffed a laugh, and scratched her jaw. “I could have you thrown in jail for this, Nico. And your feathered friend melted for scrap.” How dare he bring that AI on her ship again!

  “But you won’t!” Nico cried. “Please, Tante Sass, hear us out!”

  The emu turned enormous eyes on her. How did an electric bird manage to look so sorrowful? Were its eyes watering? “No, Nico. We should go. She doesn’t like us.” His voice, as well, dripped a depressive guilt trip like the human pros.

  Nico threw his arm around his friend and hugged him. “She’s just fearful. You remember what happened when Bloki took over her ship. But Sass, that can’t happen with Floki.”

  Yes, tears were streaming from its eyes. “I don’t extend past my physical form. I choose to stay within this body and experience life as you do. Founding Sylvan is the most exciting advance of the century. We want to contribute.”

  Nico nodded emphatically. “I can set up their information infrastructure. And Floki can synthesize data much faster than your human team. I already proposed it to Eli. But he said I needed to talk to you.”

  “Your dads said no,” Sass reminded him.

  “Ben suggested a long engagement,” Nico confessed. “Dad asked us to leave the room.”

  “Engage –!” Sass rubbed her upper lip. “What exactly is your…?”

  Floki replied. “We’re a committed couple. The family needs time to accept this.” Bird and young man gazed mournfully at each other. “A human form might help. Maybe a girl body?”

  “I don’t see you as a girl,” Nico reassured him. “However you see yourself is fine with me, Floki, you know that.”

  “We promised to be businesslike,” Floki reminded him. “Captain Collier, I’ve just beamed you our resumes. We have crew experience on Thrive and Prosper. Plus intimate knowledge of your computer systems, and all existing data on Sylvan.”

  “We’ve set up information architecture before, captain,” Nico followed this up. “Several contracts for Thrive Inc. subsidiaries. And the Denali in Pono’s rings. I included a reference from Tarana. We developed the software she uses to track her people and their income for paying off their indentures. And their Denali taxes. Wow, their taxes are high.”

  “Tarana said it was a great idea,” Floki added. “She’d love for us to come.”

  Sass sighed and resumed her seat, waving for Nico to take the visitor chair. The easiest way to escape this excruciating interview was to reject their resumes. The electric emu stepped in and folded its lower legs to sit at the desk end, its head matching the height of the seated humans. She eyed him uneasily. “You have no manual dexterity, do you?”

  The bird hesitantly telescoped out a clawed appendage stored in his shoulder. It reminded her of the robot claws that murdered her and Clay time after time on Sanctuary.

  “I didn’t want to upset you.” He hastily retracted the claw. “My hands are fully functional with excellent tactile feedback.”

  “And integrated screwdrivers and drills,” Nico supplied. “Floki’s really handy when we’re installing computers. Um, pardon the pun. Was that a pun?”

  Sass gulped and opened the resumes. And she read them, and Tarana’s letter as well. The overall leader of the Denali working toward Sylvan, this was not merely a skills reference. She specifically asked for Nico and Floki to set up computing for her colony.

  That request was hard to ignore. Sass would have to call her, but not necessarily in front of the job applicants.

  Nico’s resume was stellar. His professional computing experience stretched back to age 14. He debugged the AI that coordinated goods distribution and trucking for all of Mahina, developing novel analysis tools along the way. Now 21, he’d pursued his first computing degree at Mahina University with high honors. He’d already embarked on his doctoral program before finishing the bachelor’s.

  Floki was his thesis project. His goal ever since leaving Cantons was to tame the Loki-plex of sentient AIs in such a way that they could safely migrate Loki and his phenomenal manufacturing capacity to Pono’s rings, along with the Sanctuary public he’d been created to shelter, protect, and serve.

  The packet included another recommendation from Remi Roy, her engineer. Remi didn’t suggest them for the Sylvan expedition, because he thought Sylvan was foolish. Instead he praised Nico’s responsible progress toward harnessing Loki, and how much Loki could mean for Sagamore, Remi’s home world, the other colonized moon of the gas giant Pono. Elise Pointreau’s letter of reference said much the same. She was another from the Sagamore end of the rings. Elise supplied the ‘E’ of the BECT warp gateway, a named co-inventor with Ben, Cope, and Teke.

  These recommendations were hard to dismiss. In fact, they made Sass feel guilty as sin. These past years, Thrive Spaceways moved heaven and earth to resettle Sanctuary and Denali. Meanwhile the Sagamores in exile at the Hell’s Bells space platform worked to liberate Sagamore’s enslaved paddies and transport them to freedom.

  “What would Remi and Elise say about you risking your lives on Sylvan?”

  Nico replied, “I assured Remi there’s an offline backup of Floki. I didn’t tell him where.”

  No, that wouldn’t be wise. Hell’s Bells would happily steal Floki if they could. Though R
emi, Sass judged, would not steal. He’d become a loyal member of the Thrive family, and would only argue for Sagamore’s cause. “I trust Remi. Though I wouldn’t tempt him.”

  “That was Ben’s advice,” Nico agreed. “Um, he said he wouldn’t trust Elise at all.”

  “No,” Sass agreed, and sighed. “Alright. Tarana wants you on the expedition. Which means if I don’t take you, you’ll ride on Sardine, right?”

  Floki offered, “Hopeful Thrive is not ideal for Nico. He’s from Mahina, not Denali.”

  Nico added, “Zan said he’d only permit Floki aboard unplugged, crated, and with his batteries in a separate crate in vacuum.” He gulped. “Tante Sass, I know it feels risky, but…”

  “I wish you no harm,” Floki said softly. “I only want to participate in the greatest enterprise of the century. And be with Nico.”

  Nico pounced. “And I can contribute as crew. Swab decks, fix machines and holes in the hull and life support. You know Dad. I’ve been dabbling at engineering all my life. It’s not my subject. But it is the family business. I know how to work.”

  “You don’t have to pay us,” Floki added. “Nico’s stipend from the university is generous. Though we’re saving up for human-shaped robotics. I really see myself more as a human than an emu.”

  There wasn’t a damned thing on these resumes and references Sass could object to. It all came down to trusting them. She stood abruptly. “I’ll think about it. I have your contact info. But where are you staying?” Ben and Cope’s ship, Merchant, sounded socially awkward.

  “Aunt Kassidy’s apartment at Yang-Yang Nanoceuticals,” Nico provided.

  “I’ve challenged her to a contest,” Floki volunteered. “Which of us can film more exciting footage of the Sylvan landing. She claims I can’t capture the emotional content. But I’m emotional. Captain, I want you to know. I don’t have memories as Shiva. I mean, I did originally. But now I only remember how sick they made me feel. What Shiva did to you, that isn’t in me. Shiva was a sociopath, isolated and insane. She didn’t have someone like Nico to nurture her.”