Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  She blinked her eyes, breathed, and then stared straight into the camera.

  “Thank you, Feldspar,” she said, her breath fogging in the cold air.

  Blake leapt to his feet, and his relief left him in a victorious roar. He wiped away tears he hadn’t known were there and then sat down again, nearly breaking his chair.

  “It’s good to see your face,” was all he could think to say.

  Ryan’s words were much more poignant and passionate, succeeding in bringing Kate to tears and inspiring laughter. But when Blake’s words reached her, she pressed her lips to her gloved fingers and reached out to press them against the rover’s lens.

  They talked after that. Ryan didn’t interrupt but for the occasional status update. Blake told her where he was from, what he did for a living, and how this game had become his entire life. He even told her his real name.

  She loved San Francisco and told him of a time she went there with her father, saw the Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz, and had a pastry from a shop in the Marina District. Of all that, she remembered the pastry the most.

  She had lived a life he could only dream of, yet it was he who had saved her life. He had come across her tracks, guided her to shelter, and pressurized an untested airlock. He had proven that this was not just a game, that they could litter the entire surface of Mars with livable habitats without risking a single human life. She made him feel capable of anything.

  “I look forward to meeting you in person, Blake. Perhaps on a future Eos mission.”

  Eos, Goddess of the Dawn, who had once lain with Ares, the Greek God of War, and was cursed by Aphrodite to remain in a state of love and longing for the rest of eternity. He could sympathize. His passion for the red planet hadn’t wavered since his first glimpse of it through a telescope on a field trip far away from the smog and lights of the city. Now he had a real chance of going there, a chance to escape a polluted world and build a new one.

  The batteries drained of power as Kate’s suit labored to heat the air of the larger enclosure. With another hour left before the rescue team arrived, Blake offered her Feldspar’s battery. It took some persuading from both him and Ryan to convince her to take it.

  Then, for the first time in four years, the screen went black and a new status flashed across his screen

 

  Blake rubbed his weary eyes and stood. He walked over to the door and slipped his bare feet into a pair of shoes.

  He opened the door to the bright sun shining down onto the west coast and stepped over the threshold. It was morning, and he was suddenly in the mood for a pastry.

  Bullet Catch

  Stephen Lawson

  First Runner Up in the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award 2017

  Part 1: Greed

  "A rail gun? Why on God's red planet are you building a rail gun?" Patricia asks. She studies me with eyes that are never without mischief.

  As much as I wish it would, I know my charm won't work on her. She made it quite clear that she was engaged when we started training for our one year rotation. As such, I made sure to get the requisition form signed by Mars2050's CFO and the outpost commander, Inigo. Patricia isn't handing out freebies from the supply stock.

  "It's for meteors, Trish," I say. "There isn't enough atmospheric friction to burn them up like on Earth. I'm trying to ensure the survival of the hub."

  She looks over the form, then back up at me with a raised eyebrow.

  "We're in a lava tube, Vinny," she says.

  "With solar panels and a rover parked on the upper surface."

  "I mean, you've got approval, but when you use my stock for your projects, I can't sell it to the Chinese, or Russians, or whoever else wants it."

  "Americans?"

  "We're Americans, Vinny."

  "We're mercenaries, Trish. Anyone who lands under a flag is a customer. Meteor protection is added value for transients. Anyway, that's what the supply rockets are for. The home office sends you more stuff, and you sell it."

  "You're cutting into my margin."

  "Our margin," I say. "We can't spend those bonuses if we're dead."

  She shakes her head.

  "Fine," she says, "but you'll have to build the capacitors from scratch. The only ones I have are for habitat circuitry. They wouldn't hold enough juice to launch anything bigger than a sewing needle."

  "I don't think that'll be a problem," I say.

  I've already got four of them in my storage closet.

  "Why couldn't you use up some of this dang VapoResin?" she asks.

  "Are they still sending that stuff?"

  VapoResin is an aerosol glue. It's completely fluid and non-adhesive at any atmospheric pressure above 5 psi. Below that, though, the molecules rapidly expand and bind to anything around them.

  "I guess they figured we were going to have a lot of holes to patch up in a big hurry," she says. "That's the problem with forecasting. We haven't used a single can. I ran out of room in storage, so there are stacked pallets of it sitting outside."

  Eight sols later I make my way into Faith's Saloon. Its polished bar, leather seats, and low lighting allow a peaceful escape from the harsh realities of life on Mars. It's one of the other key money-makers for Mars2050. Liquor usually makes up half a percent of every supply shipment, and at least one flag-rider has gone home with much of his paycheck already spent.

  They all bring a plastic bottle with them in their gear, but it runs out quick. That's when they meet Faith.

  "I haven't seen you in a week, Vinny," Faith says.

  "I've come to celebrate," I say, easing myself onto one of her bar stools. "I think I've solved two problems in one fell swoop."

  "That's good to hear," she says. "How are you celebrating?"

  "Bourbon probably," I say. "I'm guessing the Ruskies drank up all your cheap vodka again."

  "Not yet," she says, as she pours a double shot into a tin cup, "but they're working on it."

  The Korean exobotanists sit in the corner booth with the American agriculturalist, quietly discussing their craft.

  More than one profound comparing-of-notes has happened in Faith's, and I sense that the problems America's been having growing kale in regolith are about to be solved. Korean astronauts already enjoy the Martian variant of kimchi, made from cabbage genetically optimized for the Martian soil.

  "So were they company problems, or personal?" Faith asks.

  "A bit of both," I say.

  I sip the bourbon, and remember the fifth grade egg drop contest I won with Amos. It's probably what started me down this path. We'd been given four pieces of tape, a cardboard tube, two sheets of paper, a pencil, a rubber band, and twenty minutes. We're twins, so we've always been predisposed to load-sharing ideas.

  While the other kids built elaborate variations on da Vinci's airscrew, Amos used the paper to do some basic trigonometry. Even before he finished making calculations, I'd mounted the cardboard tube at about the angle needed to get the egg into a snow drift. We couldn't throw it—that would be cheating—but no one said anything about redirecting gravity. Our teacher said we'd bent the rules by introducing a protractor, but excused us from that week's math test anyway. Our egg was the only one that survived the fall.

  Later, we watched an old video of David Blaine catching a bullet in his mouth with a metal cup and a special mouthpiece. The precision involved with the feat was, I think, what inspired me to specialize in rocket guidance systems after Georgia Tech. That and a degree in electrical engineering got me a seat on the third rotation at Mars2050's trading hub.

  Mars2050 rents habitat connections to flag-riders with free MOXIE usage inside the hub and cheap fission-generated electricity. Most of them only bring air generation equipment for their rovers and EVA suits at this point. All of them use our gym, infirmary, and bar.

  "People are going to drink and screw," Mars2050's CEO told us during training. "Healthy people—and astronauts inhe
rently want to be healthy—work out, too. When they're under stress, like on Mars, they'll do all those things more to cope. That's our business model, except for the screwing. We can't sell that, or the flag-riders will sanction us and we won't have any customers. The wild west ain't what it used to be."

  The reactor got Patricia her ticket to Mars, but everyone has more than one skillset. Hers are running a store and splitting atoms. No nation wants to leave people on Mars indefinitely (on the taxpayer dime) any more than they want to deploy uniformed troops. That's what contractors are for.

  The economy that's sprung up inside the hub, though—trading sweet potatoes for mushrooms between greenhouses—means Ricardo's Law of comparative advantage has started to take hold. The hub makes it a positive-sum game.

  I open my laptop to send Amos an email.

  I'll launch tomorrow, it says. Flight time will be roughly one month. Reconfirm that the landing strip is still viable. I'll send you a precise splash time after the launch.

  We're currently eighty million kilometers from Earth.

  The email will take about four and a half minutes to reach Amos, travelling at the speed of light.

  The platinum ore I found will take longer, since my capacitors can only push the ceramic tube to about 30 km/s. For a rail gun, that's pretty good. In 2016, DARPA was still shooting tungsten rods at tanks at a tenth of that.

  The second-best part about this is, I'm not using any hydrocarbons to do it. Solar fuel is free.

  The best-best part is, I'm sending Amos ten kilograms of platinum, which is worth about four hundred grand. When the capacitors recharge from the solar array, I'll send more.

  "I know what you're up to," Patricia says. She looks me up and down with a gaze that I might mistake for desire under other circumstances. Right now, she looks more like a tigress eying a rabbit.

  I keep my composure, wondering if she hacked my email account or spied on my "test" launch.

  "Is that so?" I ask.

  "You're trying to get corporate to pay you a big fat bonus to stay on for another rotation—to work on 'planetary defense.' You're making a niche for yourself."

  "I'm as eager to get back to Earth as you," I say, and it's true. I'll have a bigger bonus waiting for me there.

  "Sure," she says. "We'll see what happens when our Hohmann transfer window opens."

  "Faith and Inigo have each other," I say. "Money ain't enough to keep me on this rock when all the good-looking women are spoken for."

  She snorts, batting away the compliment with a wave of her hand.

  "If I was divorced," Trish says, "I'd stay as far from my ex as I could get. If they started pumping gas on Titan, I'd go there. I don't see how you can live in the same town as your ex-wife."

  "Kids make you do that," I say.

  She studies me for a moment before looking away.

  "So what do you need today?" she asks finally. "You want parts to build your own private rover?"

  "No," I say. "I need a thousand tons of aluminum powder."

  "A thousand— For what?"

  "Have you noticed all the red iron oxide outside, just lying around?"

  "Yes . . .?"

  "I'm going to drill a hole in the side of Olympus Mons and turn it into a giant thermite torch. It'll release oxygen and heat the atmosphere enough to melt the ice. We'll get the greenhouse effect—"

  "Vinny, shut up."

  "What? I could do it. It would only take me—"

  "Just shut up and go away."

  She's smiling again, though. I watch her walk back to her small-parts shelves. The way she moves makes me hate myself, just a little.

  Three packages made it, Amos's email says. One missed the track and burned into the side of the mountain. I uploaded a video to RandomIP for you, big brother.

  Amos started calling me "big brother" when he realized that Mars's reduced mass and relative orbital speed meant time would move a teensy bit faster than on Earth. When I see him again, I'll be about one second older.

  I put on my auggles—augmented reality goggles, but really just glasses with a HUD in each lens—and pull out the fob that's synched to Amos's RandomIP fob. His video will stay on this webpage for three Earth-days or until I delete it. Then the IP address will be open to any other RandomIP subscriber. It's the best way to avoid detection on the darknet, and RandomIP's owners have come under legal scrutiny more than once.

  I lie in my bunk and use the blank ceiling as a backdrop for the holographic image. I watch, through the auggles, as an object falls from Earth's sky toward a snow-covered mountain. Air resistance has slowed it somewhat by this point, but it's still travelling fast enough to leave a smoking crater if it impacts the ground directly. Amos's cameras are too far away to pick up the gas jets, but I discern a slight trajectory shift as it falls. Then the tube touches the snow-covered slope and rides the track a full kilometer to the ground below, turning its path from 90 degrees to 0 and reducing its velocity one meter at a time.

  When it reaches ground level, the tube impacts the long snow bank that Amos piled up with a plow on his truck and finally comes to rest. He reaches into the snow and holds the tube, now cool to the touch, in front of the cameras. After glancing down at his watch, he turns the cameras back up to the sky and I watch the second tube come in.

  Being the electrician and guidance repair-man at a Mars hub is a lot like being a firefighter. If something isn't broken or in a position to become so, you have a lot of free time to kill. Trish has the store, Faith has her bar, and Inigo has his greenhouse and an endless stream of emails from corporate. I have diagnostic checks and an endless imagination.

  After I get done running my daily diagnostics on the hub's grid, I find myself back at Faith's polished bar.

  "I got coffee today," Faith says. Coffee takes far too much soil to grow locally, so we still import it from Earth. Corporate is usually good about the resupply schedule, even though they have to forecast depletion a year in advance. Trish's VapoResin stockpile is the exception.

  For us, there's no such thing as emergency resupply.

  Faith opens her vacuum canister and holds it near my nose. Just the smell of fresh beans is enough to get my brain spinning in high gear.

  "I'm sold," I say. "There was a time when I drank that stuff twice a day."

  "There was a time when you ate meat, too," she says, as she scoops beans into a hand-crank grinder.

  "Cricket patties aren't so bad," I say. "My palate adapted faster than I thought it would."

  One of the South Korean astronauts—Li, I think—pulls out a stool and sits down. I smile, but she looks worried and barely notices me.

  "Everything all right?" Faith asks, pausing in her coffee-grinding.

  "I'm pregnant," Li says, oblivious to her audience. "I think—stupid birth control—"

  That was sooner than expected. The over-under bet during training was 10 years from the time we started renting hab-hookups.

  "Oh," Faith says. She turns the coffee crank several times as she processes this.

  "I was hoping—" Li says.

  "I can run an ultrasound and some basic tests," Faith says. "Let me start this coffee for Vincent, though."

  She pauses to scoop more beans into the grinder.

  "I think maybe we'll all want some," she says, and begins grinding again.

  Part 2: Need

  Thirty minutes later, I catch a glimpse of a red-eyed Li walking out through the side door. I hear Faith sigh as she puts her auggles back in their case.

  "These are great for medicine," she says. "You can overlay scans and anatomical charts over the body in real-time. I wish I'd had auggles in the ER."

  "I get the feeling they didn't show you anything good," I say.

  "When NASA and corporate decided to up our allowable exposure to cosmic radiation, they didn't look at the effects on pregnant women. Li's the Korean geologist. She's been working on the surface four hours a sol for the last month."

  "And radiation can mut
ate cells—"

  "There's a neuroblastoma putting pressure on the fetus's spine," Faith says. "If she makes it as far as birth, there's a seventy-five percent likelihood that kid won't be able to walk, urinate, or defecate. Life will be short and miserable if it even gets that far. Right now I'm not sure it's creating enough amniotic fluid, so its lungs aren't going to develop properly."

  "Ouch," I say. "Isn't there therapy for that kind of thing? Gene editing, or chemo, or—"

  "We have some basic treatments here," Faith says, "but they're meant for fully-grown adults, and they only treat symptoms until the rotation's up. We're not set up for pediatrics. I was an ER surgeon, but even with some guidance through the auggles, I don't have the tools I'd need. She's three months along. Where we are now, it would take—"

  Faith pulls her auggles back out, and places a finger on the side of the frame.

  "—Hohmann transfer analysis—" she says to the auggles’s mic pickup, "—shipping from Earth, launch within twenty-four hours."

  Green numbers project into her eye, unseen by me. While the auggles do their thing, I wonder how long it will be before everybody on Mars is in a cancer support group.

  The Hawaiian test colony didn't have to deal with Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs), since Earth's magnetosphere acts as a radiation shield. Mars has no such field.

  "It would take a year to get a supply rocket here if it launched tomorrow."

  "What if they burned a straight line, outside of the Hohmann transfers?"

  "Eight months," Faith says. The program always does an automatic comparison. "The kid will still probably be dead by then."

  "Even if we could launch from Earth," Amos says, "how would you decelerate? If we add an engine and enough fuel to slow it down before it landed on Mars, it would require too much mass to launch from a rail gun."

  I'm not a completely soulless platinum prospector. I know my shipping method is faster, but I can't exactly show corporate my proof-of-concept and ask for supplies. I sent Amos an encrypted message through RandomIP an hour ago, and now I'm staring at the ceiling in my room watching his reply.