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

by Ginger Booth

  “Don, I should leave,” Cope encouraged. “You don’t need me here. Gang, good job. I mean, this sucks. But you handled it. Next time I won’t be here. Might not have Darren to fall back on either.”

  Don pointed to the crate. “No way we can fix that.”

  And they wouldn’t survive here a year without a few generators plus a spare. Cope nodded, lightly enough that his helmet didn’t bob. “Once we’re gone, you’ll find a way. Or you’ll do without. But it’s a technical job. You guys are the muscle. Think about it. And when you’re choosing your new team boss, think about Don. Cuz I think he nailed it.”

  He walked with them to the funeral, and took his place beside Sass, Eli, and Teke. Their row stood behind the crew who remembered the fallen. Each man and woman laid in the trench went accompanied by a tale of their most memorable accomplishment lately. Some were supplied from inside the ship, all of them on a single comm channel.

  Though the dead left Denali two years ago or more, only two of sixteen stories featured events in the rings of Pono. Cope hoped they just felt homesick for Denali today.

  He doubted they’d be the last to die.

  12

  Entering the forest at last, Sass breathed deep of the beauty. And she smelled the onions of her breakfast omelet. Walking through a vibrant primordial forest in a space suit was less than satisfying.

  The pair of hunters ahead of them hacked and slashed, one with a machete for the small stuff, the other bearing a chainsaw. She had their comms channel playing low in the background while she chatted with Teke and Eli.

  The Denali team forgot the ship’s officers weren’t on the same channel and nearly killed them all when they felled a tree without warning an hour ago. Fortunately, Teke saw the tree coming, and snatched them out of the danger zone in time.

  Sass scheduled a daily comm channel drill for the next week. A fault easily remedied, she reminded herself. It saddened her that the hunters somehow survived years in the rings without mastering basic space skills. But she’d make sure they learned now.

  She looked up, and the beauty of the woods sucked her in. Pinpricks of dazzling sun poked through the deep canopy. This particular stand was dominated by something that claimed all the light like a conifer back on Earth. But its leaves were more feathered, like a fine-thatched palmetto. Birds didn’t seem to have evolved here, the only flying creatures more along the lines of giant dragonflies and beetles.

  Something pelted her helmet from above.

  “Squirrels defend,” noted one of the hunters. He lobbed something upward, but failed to hit anything but branches. He resumed sawing their path.

  This was slow going. Sass grew up in the forests. But here as on Denali, she soon recalled that those were highly degraded forests. Her walk in the woods involved a broken paved road or a well-beaten path, not virgin underbrush. These particular trees – the hunters dubbed them hemlock – suppressed the understory well, and they’d run across a game path, or they’d make no progress at all.

  Another something hit her helmet, and Teke’s and Eli’s as well. Teke pointed. “That’s the squirrel.”

  Sass spotted their tormentor from his clue. Cute little guy. He wore a blubbery pelt like the smurfs, but a long ferret-like sinuous body. He pranced along a branch to his next ammo cache. This time he assaulted the hunter behind them. Sass laughed in delight.

  Eli asked, “So Teke. What is your goal here? You’re always studying something.”

  “Not always,” the physicist refuted this. “I’m on vacation. I created the warp gateway. When Cope goes somewhere new, I tag along. And I care about Denali. Even if I’m not one myself anymore.”

  Sass’s brow furrowed. “Does that make you sad? Not being Denali anymore?”

  “Not really. Cope’s family replaced my dead creche-mates. And I still talk to Sora.” He was an intern to the materials scientist Sora when Sass met him. “And I host a couple dozen younger Denali academics in MA. This trip has been good for me. That insight, after our run, Sass. The more I develop that, the more I think it’s going to work.”

  “To synchronize multiple gateways?” Sass thought that was his most recent plan of attack, toward a warp gateway large enough for the 5,000-passenger Martian transport.

  “No, actually. I suspect that’s impossible. But with a better power source, I can simply scale up the single gate.”

  Sass boggled. “A stronger power source than Ben’s star drive?” Nuclear warheads weren’t as powerful or readily harnessed as Merchant’s engine, the most advanced generation.

  “Yeah, I need a couple more orders of magnitude. But I had an insight. The orb of nullity, the ansible, the gateway singularity, and the AI ‘soul.’ They’re connected. In a sense that the old-style warp drive is not. I realize now that was a dead end.”

  He paused to hack off a branch the hunters missed, that thwacked him in the chest. He bore a razor-sharp machete, and knew how to use it. But his arms wore out after ten minutes slashing. Now he mostly let the pros handle the job.

  Sass held her hand out to request the implement. She took three swipes, and managed to slice a few long needle-leaves. He held up a hand to request she stop, then guided her gauntleted hands and arms for a more effective stroke. When he released her to solo again, she was able to cut branches, chopping downward instead of across like a baseball bat.

  “They don’t burn,” she suddenly realized aloud. At these oxygen levels, cutting with sharp steel, it wouldn’t take much to set twigs ablaze. She stopped to study a truncated branch, oozing a watery yellow.

  Eli joined her to study the seeping liquid. “That makes sense. Defense against fire. To a point.” He rubbed the sap between thumb and forefinger of his gauntlet, then struggled to get them apart again. “Good glue.”

  “Mind blowing,” Sass murmured. “All the forest technologies on Earth. Turpentine, rubber, aspirin, venison, berries. Lifetimes of expertise. The forests of Denali as well. This is my third forest world. Fourth if you count the stunted stuff on Cantons. And I know nothing. Humbling.”

  Another something rapped her helmet. This time she caught it. “Huh. This looks like a nut.” She passed it to Eli.

  He studied it in delight until their rear guard prodded them along, then stowed it. “I can’t wait to gene sequence all this.”

  “Don’t bother. Just ask them when we’re done.” Teke nodded to the hunters ahead.

  The dark hemlock grove lightened, and the ground grew less springy underfoot. “Clone break,” the hunter Griez noted, the woman of the pair. “Brook.”

  They’d struggled harder at cutting here. The path grew treacherous with stems and broken plants. The dominant trees took on a more deciduous, airy look, though Sass was fairly sure they were still evergreens, or ever-purples in this case, the needles a healthy grey-lavender shade, dripping with short fluffy catkins. The dark green hemlocks seemed to avoid the banks of the stream, but picked up again as an understory species on the other side.

  “Clone break?” Eli asked, switching to the hunters’ channel.

  “The aspen.” Griez pointed to the lavender species, which did look a little like the quavering coin-shaped leaves of aspen. Sass planted plenty of aspen and spruce on her prison farm back on Mahina, the only two landscape-scale tree species approved at the time. “Aspen is the clone that sent shoots into our tents. Hemlock grows from the nuts.”

  Sass joined the channel. “What do the animals eat, Griez?”

  “Squirrels eat nuts. Haven’t seen the deer that graze on hemlock yet.” She pointed to fresh scraping damage on a hemlock to their left, which reached twice Sass’s height. “Smurf prefer aspen groves.”

  Eli appeared to still be puzzling out how she knew it was aspen trying to reclaim their clearing. Teke inquired, “Did you call the brook an aspen break?”

  “Brook is where the deer walk. Graze on baby hemlock. Aspen can’t compete with hemlock.” Griez got busy with her chainsaw again, this time trying to fell a third species of tr
ee, dark green and shorter, to fall across the brook as a bridge.

  As the tree vibrated from the saw, a flurry of irate squirrels leapt away. Something bunny-like fled from the base straight at them. Teke, quick on his feet, got a specimen bag over it. Griez halted her cutting and joined them to look. Blubber-pelted like the rest, the ‘bunny’ was lighter than a ‘squirrel’, striped to blend into the underbrush, with powerful kicking hind legs, its only real resemblance to a rabbit. Panicked mewling emerged from the den beneath the tree as the bunny frantically tried to break free.

  “Den,” Griez noted. “Young.”

  Teke immediately loosed the bunny, who squeaked emphatically, and hopped away along the brook. Her babies emerged to hastily follow mommy. Assuming bunnies came in male and female. Evolution on Earth and Denali alike exploited the sex strategy across plant and animal kingdoms. In seconds, the displaced bunny family vanished into the brush. Griez completed her wedge cuts, and the tree fell across the fast-flowing brook. She and her partner, Tonn, set to hacking enough branches to allow them to cross.

  Sass stepped the first couple yards onto the bridge to study the brook itself, clear, running fast and icy cold. She didn’t spot anything alive in there. “There are no banks to this brook.”

  “Temporary,” Tonn agreed. “All the waterways.”

  As though to underscore his point, the tree jolted under her feet. She looked up to see another piece of tree, borne by the stream, had rammed it. From this vantage, she could see another coming, much bigger. “Is that a –?”

  But Tonn barreled into her. “Run!”

  Quick on the uptake, Sass fled the bridge. Griez, now last in line, took a flying leap as the tree bridge suddenly skewed loose under the other tree’s ramming momentum. She landed with one foot in the stream, up to her knee, and began to fall in. But Sass caught her arm bearing the chainsaw, and Tonn her belt and a sapling for anchor. Between them they managed to pull Griez to safety.

  But the female hunter breathed raggedly.

  They draped her across a shrub with fat scarlet twigs. Sass hastily tested her suit for the rupture. She blocked the airflow with two mitts on one leg, then the other. There! Through the tear, Sass spied blood. She got a quick tourniquet on the problem to correct the air issue. Teke cast an emergency air bubble around them, and fed it from his own air canister.

  The cut to the woman’s shin was shallow, but Sass cleaned it with a foaming peroxide and gauze, then smeared it with a wide-spectrum Denali antibiotic before sealing the suit. By then Griez breathed easily again, and Sass sliced them out of the bubble.

  “Her heart rate is low,” Eli worried. “Is that a hunter thing?”

  “No,” Teke judged.

  “Allergy,” Tonn guessed. He picked her up in his arms. “Advance to camp.” Whereupon their trailing hunter swapped position with him, and Tonn led the way at a trot. Sass and Eli picked up the discarded machete and chainsaw, and started jogging as well.

  They made it halfway back to the clearing before they met a smurf family admiring the fancy new highway through their woods.

  13

  Tonn froze, Griez in his arms, and stared at the smurfs. Sass didn’t share his indecision. “Gravity assist. I’ll take her.” She claimed the gravity generator clipped to the hunter woman’s belt, then lifted her into a fireman’s carry – not easy in the bulk of spacesuits, but not heavy due to the double generators. “See you on the other side.”

  Adept at grav, including body carries, she floated up to the trees at net 0.1 up gravity, gradually rolling perpendicular to her gravity drift. Then, in the move Mahina parents so strenuously taught their children not to do, she set her gravity directly forward and just a little downward, brushing through branches as she went. She chuckled as a squirrel-weasel, momentarily agog, fled in terror.

  She assumed the hunters would attack the smurfs, all four of them, and protect the scientists, now that she’d removed the wounded from the equation. Instead Eli, veteran of many the EVA game, unhappily headed up to follow her. And judging by a hasty physics lecture, Teke attempted to teach the hunters how to do the same.

  Sass switched channel briefly. “Tikka, incoming on Griez. Please check her vitals remotely.”

  “No can do,” Kassidy returned, instead of the physiologist-turned-medic Tikka Gena. “I’ll meet you. Is she conscious?”

  “Don’t think so. Do not enter the path. We are bypassing smurfs.”

  The smurfs meanwhile watched in fascination and no fear whatsoever. Papa Smurf, the biggest, craned his neck back and watched Sass float above his head in fascination. A sudden memory of her son’s toddler years came to her. Their reach is twice as long as their arms. It got longer still when they could stand and climb. She radically switched direction a moment before Papa Smurf rose onto his hind legs and swiped toward her, missing by mere inches. The hunters hadn’t cut a terribly tall path through this wood.

  This emergency maneuver left her caught between branches, and the largest smurf was still fascinated by her. He dropped to all fours to lope closer, then stood again to reach for her. With nowhere else to go, Sass headed further up the tree, literally. She hated that sensation of falling upward head-first, no matter how low the gravity.

  But abruptly, Papa Smurf grunted and dropped, twitching. With a wary eye on Mama Smurf – the other big one, anyway – Sass tried to manipulate her gravity out of the branch trap, but kept getting slowed by smaller branches, which pushed back harder than 0.1 g pushed her forward.

  Fingering the generator while warding off thwacking branches was an exercise in frustration. She’d finally got the gizmo reset to 0.2 g when suddenly the branch currently frustrating her fell to the ground, right on Mama, Teen Bad Boy, and Baby Smurf. She glanced behind in astonishment to find Teke and Tonn right behind her, unencumbered with a body. They’d hopped up and cut the branch with the chain saw.

  Sass made a mental note to run EVA game training with the hunters, in addition to her Simon Says game to build comm channel reflexes. She whipped her head back to where she was going just as a branch whipped into her, now ‘falling’ forward much quicker. She boomeranged a little, only to receive a surprise shove between her shoulder blades, sending her back toward the path’s direction. Their tail-end Charlie, Kane, leap-frogged her after adding the push, and grabbed hold of the branch of another tree to take station.

  “I’d like a specimen,” Eli suggested. “Maybe the baby smurf?”

  “Not now, Eli!” Sass growled, simultaneously with every other member of the party. The captain added, “Are any of the smurfs still standing?”

  “Stay aloft,” Kane directed. “Come down after the turn.”

  Holding still, he was certainly in a better position to judge than she was. So Sass followed his directions, though she tried to float along lower in the canopy. Once she’d reduced her branch hazards, she dialed down to 0.1g again. Acceleration was acceleration, no matter how low, which was why Mahina parents and teachers were so adamant that their charges never do this. It wasn’t a safe way to travel unless you were headed, or rather footed, at something nearby, and preferably padded. But she managed to brake herself often enough on side branches. She didn’t so much make the turn as bounce into a hemlock branch that stopped her, then fall down to the ground in slow motion. Space suits were tough.

  And after a half dozen jogging steps to see the new path direction, she headed straight back up. “I found the deer. He’s very tall.”

  In fact, he was standing on his hind legs right now, biting the base of a lower branch of hemlock, to bring it to the ground for his munching convenience. As Sass ‘landed’ on a cozy branch above, his girlfriend, or some smaller variant of himself, loped into view.

  Like Papa Smurf, the deer suddenly fell to the ground, followed a split-second later by his girlfriend, both felled by stunners.

  “Fifteen meters to trail head,” Tonn advised. “Get past them and go.”

  “Right. Thanks.” Sass chose to take it by
angling down. Then she cut off her gravity and ran full-out to exit the woods. There Kassidy waited with an emergency air bubble already inflated. She’d used her time thoughtfully, first surrounding her pink refuge with sonic stakes. Sass made straight for it, but Tonn outran her to break the sonic barrier for her. Eli cast her an airlock annex, blocking her in as soon as she reached the bubble wall. Kassidy stuck some instrument into her annex that began deflating it around her, to get rid of the Sylvan air. Then she sliced the wall open, and held up two fingers.

  “Sorry,” Sass said, hastily switching to channel two. She lay Griez down. Kassidy immediately removed the woman’s helmet and injected something into her neck. “Epinephrine. Oldie but goody.” She crouched watching the medical tell-tales on the hunter’s suit, but it proved superfluous. Griez’s eyes started fluttering, and she took a deep breath. Kassidy and Sass both jerked back onto their butts as their patient suddenly sat up.

  “What?” Griez asked.

  “Oldie but goody indeed.” Sass pointed to the hunter’s helmet to suggest she put it back on. But her helmet offered broadcast, so she needn’t wait for a comms channel. “You had an allergic reaction to your cut.”

  Kassidy asked Griez to stand and pace a few laps of their limited bubble, and watched her like a hawk as she reaffixed her helmet, carrying out the proper test sequence. Apparently the medic was satisfied with what she saw. “Sass, take her through the bio-lock. Strip along the way and check the cut. Don’t bring an infection inside.”

  Sass smirked. “Aye, sar.”