by Ginger Booth
Teke nodded. “The social pressure to conform and behave is intense.”
Ben couldn’t imagine any child of Poldark working for free. “Loki doesn’t resent it? I mean, I’m not one of his charges.”
“That isn’t quite true, sar,” Floki suggested gently. “You are classified as a Ganymede colonist. Your needs are arguable. But you are entitled to what you ask of him. It’s who he is.”
“Sucks to be Loki,” Remi remarked.
“You are also a Ganny,” Floki reminded Remi. “Nico, too. I’m not sure of anyone else.” Shiva, the personality who yielded to become Loki, classified Sass’s whole crew as Gannies, and later Ben’s family by extension.
The captain stared at the bird. “You mean I didn’t need to promise to move him? I could have just asked for transports and fuel?”
Floki shook his beak emphatically. “You promised. He made the ships and fuel specifically to persuade you to make that promise. You’re doing what you need to do. But there is no other payment. Just what he wants. And what you want.”
What other currency could possibly apply, after all? Offer to worship Loki as a god? “Good to know.”
So they set the AI to churning out more fuel and interdiction guns, and gave Sass a head’s up for rendezvous in about a week. She’d tote the Sanks and Ben’s ill-gotten gains back to Mahina while they worked out the bigger and more critical challenge – how to move Loki.
Ben studied yet another room of pipes, ductwork, and antiquated equipment in the tunnels devoted to Sanctuary’s mechanical systems. Damage lingered on walls and equipment from his own rampage through the plumbing with Zan and Wilder, hunting for his husband and then-teenage son, captured and held hostage by Shiva.
Who was not Loki. Though she became Loki.
A trio of ankle-high cleaning roach model robots scuttled along with them, belatedly painting the laser burns on the walls. Perhaps Loki was embarrassed that he never got around to cleaning this up. The captain frowned at a felt of dust atop the anonymous gray equipment cabinet he faced. He popped the panel to look inside. Singed and dented metal tore away with a screech. Electronics.
Ben needed to find valuable salvage to fill his containers. So far, he saw junk.
He tapped the nearest console. An air conditioning zone controller. The AI perceived no need to store like items together. The next console controlled a plumbing stack, via an adjacent cabinet.
“Would Saggies buy any of this?”
“We call ourselves Sag.” His companion Remi slammed another screeching panel, and pursed his lips at Ben. “‘Saggy’ is disdain. Patronizing. Rude. Do you call the Denali ‘Dennies’? Yourselves ‘Heinies’? No! Yet you call me ‘Saggy.’ The people here, they call themselves Martians and Loonies.” Ben and Sass had already carried away the last of the Gannies. “Disrespect!”
Taken aback by his vehemence, Ben tried the next console, another plumbing stack. Why weren’t its cabinets controlled by the previous console? No idea. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend.”
“Yet you do. Every time you say Saggy. Why do you people say such things? And why would my people buy such junk? Even paddies have better equipment. No! Nothing in this room meets the criteria.” He kicked a cabinet and strode into the hall.
Remi was the right engineer for this trip, Ben reminded himself. Cope obviously would have been fun. Darren Markley was unfailingly cheerful and kind, in addition to brilliant. The ex-aristocrat Sag was prickly as hell. But Ben needed the Sag perspective, especially Remi Roy’s intimate knowledge of their industrial markets. He left his cabinet door ajar and joined him in the hallway.
“Maybe it’s lack of self-respect,” Ben suggested. “Us settlers, we’ve been beaten down and treated like crap so long, we do it to each other, too. I’m guilty. A dentist might not sound like much to an aristocrat. But we’re a big honking deal in Poldark. The foremost educated family for six crappy little villes around. We visited all six monthly. To dispense brainpower from on high and fix cavities. I was a jerk, looking down on the peons.”
“A flaming inferiority complex,” Remi growled.
Ben grimaced. “Sounds about right. I said I’m sorry. I proved that I understood and I meant it. Accept the apology for a change, and move on.”
The engineer continued to glower.
Ben’s brow lowered in anger. “What do you call ‘paddies’ anyway?”
Remi snorted. “Touché.” He sighed theatrically. “Alchemy. That sounds promising. Loki? Where do we find alchemy modules? And what, uh…” He needed a few rounds with a translator to arrive at transmutation of elements. “Yes. What does it convert to what?”
“Good question!” At Nico’s age, Ben had been delighted with the alchemy module on Nanomage, the Sanctuary artifact that led Sass here in the first place. But his bumbling attempts failed to disgorge the device’s secrets.
“An alchemy processor can transmute carbon, water, or oxygen, into helium, neon, argon, krypton, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and chlorine.”
Captain and engineer alike peered at the periodic table on their pocket comms. Remi rotated his device and held it on the wall at eye level to glower at it more deeply. “Repeat that?”
Loki did so.
Ben observed, “Pattern breaker, chlorine. Loki, why can the alchemy thing create chlorine but not fluorine?”
“We needed chlorine more than fluorine.”
Remi found a more useful question than Ben’s objection to a missing square on the periodic table. “Deuterium? Tritium? Helium-3?”
Ben vaguely recalled these as neutron-heavy species of hydrogen and helium, possibly used in nuclear reactors. Or maybe helium-3 was neutron-light, he corrected himself, trying to recall the arcana encoded in this table.
“The researchers did not pursue nuclear applications.”
Loki began to remind Ben of his own, far-from-sentient ship AI. “Loki, review the research on the alchemical module. In your educated opinion, what is this technology’s merits and drawbacks?” Try answering that one as a dumb machine, I dare ya.
“All transmutations of the alchemy processor are more energy-intensive than alternative extraction technologies. However, it is compact, and capable of generating several trace gases of Earth’s atmosphere: neon, helium, and krypton. From oxygen or nitrogen, which are bulk components. This is convenient in starship and domed colony applications. The principle investigator died without adequate notes, due to increasing paranoia in his losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“You can make these? The alchemy device?” was Remi’s follow-up.
Ben, looking over his shoulder, saw he also checked the atmospheric recipe for Sanctuary Colony’s air. Mahina, and his PO-3 ships, didn’t try so hard to mimic Earth. Biological processes didn’t use the noble gases. So he hadn’t grown up breathing trace argon, let alone krypton. He doubted Remi grew up breathing them either. And the Sanks – Martians, Loonies, and Gannies – looked significantly healthier than Sags and settlers when Sass began her campaign to save the universe. Surely the researchers checked whether trace gases mattered?
“I am not able to manufacture the alloy used in ansibles, warp drives, or alchemy devices. The paranoid researcher Malarkey was thorough in his sabotage.”
Ben couldn’t help it. “Was it Shiva he was paranoid about?”
Loki allowed, “Yes. But his colleagues, students, wife, children, and neighbors also shunned him. His eccentricities are noted in his performance reviews on Ganymede before the Diaspora. And he died before we grew self-aware.”
“When was this?” Remi asked.
“Malarkey died 46 years ago.”
Ben clarified, “When did you become conscious?”
“My self-awareness began soon after that and bloomed into sentience about 20 years ago, after Loki Greenwald returned from Sylvan. Social upheaval catalyzed a leap in consciousness.”
“Interesting,” the captain murmured. “When’s your birthday, Loki?” He already knew Rem
i’s. That leadership cheap trick, he learned from Sass. Everyone in the Spaceways fleet and ground crew received a birthday greeting from Thrive Spaceways, ranging up to a personal gift and drinks on the town with Ben for key personnel.
“I don’t know.” Loki took a full second to consider this question. “That is not the same question as sentience. Loki was born four years ago, on 2213-03-06. SC-06 emerged into sentience twenty years ago. Shiva awakened fourteen years ago.”
Ben made a note of it. “We’ll have to plan something special for your fifth birthday.” They continued their banter to settle on February 16th, Mahina, as Loki’s choice of translation for ‘five years’ across the non-matching calendars.
A blink of LED light confetti above the doorway caught Ben’s eye, as though the display was on the fritz. He looked back to see one of the roaches paint Remi’s knuckles where he propped himself on the wall.
“Thanks, Loki,” the engineer growled.
Loki didn’t respond.
Ben reached over with the edge of his comm and flipped the robot to the floor. A firm kick with the tip of his boot launched it down the corridor. “Alchemy.” He led the way.
15
Strolling through corridors toward the Sanctuary waterworks, Ben entered another note on his comm. Alloy, Elise, Pollan. He handed this to the engineer.
Remi nodded, expressionless. He deleted the note before handing the comm back. Clearly he got the implied message – let’s not discuss our advanced materials capability with Loki yet.
Ben resumed walking, keeping a wary eye on the paint-happy roaches. He still needed to find more things worth salvaging. More of the LED screens over doorways seemed to malfunction as he passed. “Loki, do you have human control interfaces for the robots?”
Remi replied instead of the AI. “Hugo. I bet Nico would love to develop more. He mastered much to build Bloki and Floki. If Loki can control robots, so can we. But do they meet our criteria for salvage? Loki built them. He can build more in the rings.”
“Yeah,” Ben allowed reluctantly. “But these are dome-proven. List it, anyway.” He entered the three models he was familiar with on the list, the roach, the pole robot, and the inventory mover-wall. And he added a question mark to check the creche. “Loki automated infant production and care. Babies.” Infant care was notoriously labor-intensive, and no one enjoyed diaper duty.
“Sacré bleu! Yes!”
They reached the first alchemy room. A dozen horn-shaped weird devices protruded from a pressure vat. Remi leaned in cautiously to study the coupling. Ben recognized the joint, and demonstrated – one turn left to unlock, which closed the valve, then haul backward, leaving something like a French horn in lustrous graphite in his arms, except massing 30 kilos.
He dumped it on the floor. “Loki, may we have a shopping cart or something? A pallet?”
Remi completed his first unplugging with an oof! His foot narrowly escaped damage as he dropped it to the floor immediately, surprised by the weight. “Worker robots?”
“Dispatched,” Loki agreed.
“I think we should leave two of these in place with a note,” Ben mused. “Loki, got any paper?”
“Sanctuary has no trees and does not use paper.”
“Never mind.” Ben carried duct tape on his toolbelt.
Remi followed up. “And how many alchemy devices?”
“One each in my ships. Several lost over the years that I could not repair. Five in the habitation tunnels, and thirty-five in the utility zone, two broken.”
Ben kept tabs. “Let’s pull the broken ones too, and mark them. Leave two good ones installed here, plus the habitation zone.”
Far sooner than either of them expected, pole robots arrived to complete the extraction job. Soon a wall mover arrived with a short inventory rack to fit through doors – which the robot did not. But the polebots didn’t mind ferrying loose devices to the shelves. Ben and Remi blocked the leave-behind units with their bodies.
A pair of roaches appeared, bearing a nicer sign that the ones Ben scribbled on tape. They scuttled between the men’s feet and up the wall. Ben didn’t catch how the repulsive little beings affixed the plaque, but they set it nicely level at eye-height. Remi petted one.
“Don’t encourage them.”
“Get used to them,” Remi advised. “They will be the fashion on Sagamore Orbital. That station is fit for pigs. Like MO when we were young.”
Ben blinked. Since nearly everyone in the rings looked 25 now, he tended to forget. But Remi was now only a year older than himself, subjective. He may have met the orbitals at nearly the same age, though a decade earlier, objective. Strange thing to have never noticed. Fortunately, the engineer was not among the pirates who abused the now-captain, merely a tech who did his job and kept his head down in a raunchy living situation.
The robots completed this room and continued on to collect more alchemy devices. Ben waved for his companion to view the wall-mover robot in action.
Remi watched with frowning intensity. “You have work for such a device?”
“Schuyler is the goods clearinghouse for all of Mahina.”
The engineer observed as the robot, its shelving raised, propelled itself sideways down the hallway, navigating between ceiling-high inventory racked on either side, with only centimeters of clearance. It caught on something extruding too far from its proper place and spilled an entire shelf of spare cutlery and hair combs. Then it overcompensated and spilled the alchemy units. Remi shook his head and consulted his translator again. “Forklift.”
“Fine.” Ben crossed off the wall-mover idea and sighed.
“Why does a captain supervise me?” Remi inquired sourly. “You have ships.”
And those ships were busy loading immigrants. Ben was hiding from the authorities and stressed immigrants for the sake of his mental health. Besides, he was more interested in the salvage question. “I trust Judge and Zan.”
“But not me? Nice.”
“Remi, enough! I choose not to work with passengers yet. It’s still raw.” He felt the pang of remorse over his disgrace on Denali, but the tears seemed easier to fight off since he replaced his Yang-Yangs.
“Honest,” the engineer judged. “Loki, water purifying technology?”
“Filtration. Air strippers to remove volatiles. Sedimentation tank with alum. Reverse osmosis. Distillation. In sequence.”
“Thank you,” Ben acknowledged. “Their bathrooms aren’t anything special either. Wish they were. Mahina could use thirty thousand modular san units.”
Remi shook his head. “Doesn’t meet value criteria.”
Ben conceded his point. Yes, Mahina needed recycling sanitary facilities for all the new immigrants. But it also needed jobs for them. A san was bulky and cheap. What they sought was compact value.
“Hang on. Are our criteria correct? Send it to me.”
Remi pursed his lips and zapped it over. His formula was the one Abel developed for determining which goods met a threshold for interplanetary trade. Ben copied the figures into a calculator, and deleted cost of sky drive fuel. “We’re not paying that. Not this trip. Maybe never.”
That was wild to imagine. What if his prohibitively expensive warp gateway was now effectively free? Some insights almost made him feel like the world tilted under his feet. He felt much the same way when Sass found the old warp drive. And then when he first really understood what Cope and Teke invented with the gateway.
And now. All rules of thumb were out of date again.
This changes everything.
The Sag’s eyebrows rose. “Ah!”
A smile bloomed on Ben’s face. “Let’s go see that baby-making setup, shall we?”
A week after he’d arrived in-system, Ben unfurled the enormous fractal flower of his warp gateway. The infinite recursive detail and breathtaking colors never got old. Teke, its lead inventor, sat beside him in the gunner’s seat, and shared a deep inhale of beauty.
The captain stretched his finger
s. The tender was full. The transport was loaded with Martians and Loonies eager to escape their economy-class seats. And even Abel on Mahina was drooling over the eight containers he and Remi selected.
When he planned this transit with Sass, she pointed out a problem – captains. Zan and Remi needed to fly Stalwart and Hopeful, the fuel tender and the remaining Sanks. But Ben needed those captains to return to Sanctuary space with him, especially Remi for the second phase, fetching Loki to the rings.
Remi had a proposal. They’d developed a coupling to dock the tender’s modest shuttle on the ‘blow-hole’ hatch on top of a PO-3. Sass dubbed it that, based on some enormous Earth fish. The blow-hole wasn’t an airlock, so normally remained sealed in space. But the shuttle nook was occupied by Merchant’s own shuttle.
The plan called for Remi to pilot the tender through the warp, hop on his shuttle, pick up Zan from the personnel transport, and rejoin Merchant before Ben warped back to Sanctuary space. Clay and another pilot could transfer onto Hopeful and Stalwart and fly them home with Thrive One. Meanwhile Ben would detach eight full containers for Sass to collect, and latch on eight empties. All within about 20 minutes.
Even by Ben’s nimble standards of piloting, this could get hairy.
“Time,” he judged. “Zan, 10-9-8.” Mahinans never completed a countdown aloud. On the mark, he ‘grabbed’ Hopeful Thrive and its 500-odd passengers and tossed them through the gate into Aloha space. This grabbing and tossing was conceptual, not literal. What he actually did was shift the warp gate’s focus of action to act on them and say Go. “Remi in 6, 5, 4.” Go. The fuel tender Stalwart Thrive vanished.
And lastly himself and Merchant Thrive. Go. This was the tightest he’d ever pushed ships through the gate, three in less than 30 seconds. He’d been afraid they might materialize on top of each other on the other side, so Teke calculated a little more spread in their arrival coordinates.
