Thrive Earth Return (Thrive Colony Corps Space Adventures Book 1)

by Ginger Booth

  “Mr. Chairman, I do have one more question for now,” Ben brought up. “Are you in contact with Earth, Luna, Ganymede?”

  “Ganymede was abandoned after the Diaspora,” Groot confirmed. “A platform hung on in the belt for a couple decades. Since then we haven’t heard from them. Luna and Earth are alive and well. Damn them to hell.”

  “A lot of people?”

  “Maybe a few million on Luna. Earth, no idea. A lot.”

  “And Mars One?”

  “Twelve thousand,” he replied bitterly. “And falling.”

  “I know this is a lot to ask,” Ben broached the subject. “But my ships are small. Could you please not tell Luna and Earth about us? I assume they’re still capable of…?”

  “Damn near anything,” Groot confirmed.

  “But not, I hope, arriving at Mars, from opposition, in under a couple months?” Mars and Earth were presently about as far apart as they could get.

  “More like a couple years at opposition.”

  “Excellent, thank you. Because, Chairman, if they were to threaten me, I would run away. And the Colony Corps would never return.” Ben shrugged apologetically. “Too dangerous.”

  “Understood.”

  Ben didn’t like that cold brusque tone. Damn. Groot had to live in this neighborhood once Merchant Thrive left. “We do come bearing gifts, sir. And perhaps my engineer and doctor could prove helpful.”

  “Hell yeah. Tomorrow.” Groot abruptly cut the channel.

  Ben’s chief engineer Remi Roy stretched his arms over his head. In his Sagamore-French accent, he drawled, “That did not go well, cap. He sells you in a heartbeat. Blabs all he knows.”

  “Yeah, I got that impression,” Ben agreed. Sorry, Sass. “He might wait til after our lunch.” He reconsidered. If he intended to screw someone over, he’d prefer to do it ‘before we became friends.’ More forgivable that way. “Might not.”

  Remi smirked. “Not. Hugo, monitor comms.”

  Ben nodded to confirm the order. He rose and rapped the table. “Keep up the good work.”

  He departed to strategize with his doctor on which tempting gifts of health to dangle on the morrow. In teaser quantities only – for substantial reward, he required good behavior up front.

  A wary lackey threaded his way into the lair of President Alexei Alexeyevich Voronin, despot of Russia. In this dome of minuscule apartments in a loop of the great Volga River, Voronin’s vast office could have housed a thousand.

  But this was merely his public room. His private apartment was smaller. He continued lining up his shot on his hexagonal pool table, three banks and into the pocket. With narrowed eyes and his peripheral vision, he noted which footbridge the man selected over the winding lap pool. He offered three choices. The green one would be at home in a Japanese garden. Fussier was the red Chinese with boxy lanterns. Least inviting was the Russian, a utilitarian aluminum plank, farthest from the entrance.

  He smiled privately as the young man chose correctly, and stayed on the path through the miniature golf course. He made a note to ask whether anyone had briefed him. That was forbidden.

  Voronin and his guest sported none of the appalling mosaics the Westerners wore. Russian culture considered genetic pollution repulsive. No, though both men were enhanced, their accessories remained hidden to adversaries. The President looked like what he was – a powerfully built man of late middle age, with small eyes and receding white hair. With no ceremonies planned today, he wore a polo shirt over snug jeans and bare feet. The room was chilly, but Voronin didn’t bundle himself like an effete American. That made one sickly in winter.

  The flunky reached him at last. Voronin held his pool cue between his hands and slapped it down on the edge of the pool table with a loud clack, startling the man as intended. “You are?”

  “Ostrovsky, sir. I am your liaison with Baikonur Cosmodrome.”

  Voronin pressed his lips for a few seconds before replying. “My liaison? I am not so intimate with Baikonur.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ostrovsky dipped his head and swallowed. “We’ve detected a disturbance, sir. Over the Atlantic. It initiated the space defense grid, which fired from four satellites. This event was preceded and followed by a…signal distortion.”

  “Luna dares to attack again?”

  The hapless messenger cocked his head. “The trajectory is not ballistic. Rather, it seems to have entered orbit.”

  “Show me.” The President waved a hand to his standing desk, a podium placed before a wall-sized window overlooking the flat dead yellow vista of November beyond the Volga. Fertile cropland, and the snows had yet to come. But a warmer climate still brought little sun in winter. A faint twitch in his cheek caused a computer display to unravel from the ceiling.

  Ostrovsky stepped to the podium. He studied the computer interface briefly – it was ordinary, and unlocked – and brought up his diagram. A highlighted track showed an arc rising between South America and Africa. The curve topped somewhere over the boreal forests of North America and headed west.

  A brief section showed red asterisks. “Satellites targeted the intruder from these locations.”

  “Intruder?” Voronin pressed. “Surely this is an assumption.”

  “Y-yes, but it seems likely. The first disturbance, here, was accompanied by a novel array of electromagnetic noise. Unfamiliar readings. Satellite communications were disrupted for 15 minutes. The noise source followed this track. Then vanished here.” He pointed to where the red asterisks began. “At which point the defense satellites began shooting at it.”

  “But they stopped.”

  “Yes, part of the disruptive noise resumed at this point. Now the satellites are confused again.”

  “Un-confuse them,” Voronin ordered. “Quickly.”

  “Yes, sir. But that will take time. Possibly days.”

  The President pursed his lips to make the man squirm, then relented. “So what is it doing? Landing in the Arctic?”

  “Ah! No. We believe it’s orbiting Earth. Possibly scouting. Like this.” The man pantomimed winding a piece of yarn – circles with one hand, while rotating an imaginary yarn ball with the other.

  “I don’t knit,” Voronin replied dryly. “Perhaps I should. I hear it’s good for stress.” He bent the pool cue, back in his hands, nearly to the breaking point.

  Ostrovsky turned hastily back to his display. “This is the trajectory it crosses above Earth.” He showed an animation of a half dozen cycles, drawn with a pale line and white blip of traveling disturbance, as the planet rotated much more slowly. “It should cross within Baikonur’s observational range on its fifth or sixth orbital pass. We should be able to take more accurate readings then, perhaps even visuals on the vessel. We don’t have quite enough data to chart its path accurately yet. Perhaps within the hour. But our current forecast is that it will cross within line of sight of Baikonur in about ten hours.”

  “At which time you will report to me again. In person.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Speculate, Ostrovsky. Is this Loonies again?”

  The emissary from Baikonur stared at his stalled animation, and slowly shook his head. “It’s possible. But we think it’s extra-solar. Human or alien, we don’t know. But Mars or Luna, we would be very surprised. We do pay spies there.”

  “Indeed.”

  Ostrovsky pulled up another picture on the screen, a blue sky muddied with dust aloft. Everyone was familiar with such dust, especially present company, old enough to recall the Lunar War. No, the flunky’s interest was a tiny scribble in mid-sky. He zoomed until the sky graffiti was as big as the President’s hand. He walked over to peer at it closely.

  Against the bright sky, it looked like a loose skein of many-colored pastel embroidery floss, knotted somewhat thicker in the middle. “What is this?”

  “We don’t know. But that’s the best visual we have of the original fifteen-minute event. And sir, we know of nothing – nothing – that emits a radiation signature
like this.”

  “And its current appearance?”

  Ostrovsky shook his head. “We can’t see it. It’s four thousand kilometers up. It isn’t very big. The weaker noise, though, that could be spoofed with a star drive exhaust. Though different from our star drives.”

  Voronin straightened. “Curious. Keep me apprised.”

  “Sir. And should we notify Pontiac, Hakone, and Oslo?”

  Russia was obligated by treaty to do so, as they maintained the Northern League’s sole spaceport. The President raised a bland eyebrow. “Not yet. You may go.”

  The scientist bowed acceptance and walked away, keeping to the safe track through the amusing minefield of the miniature golf course. Voronin liked this one. He accessed the man’s resume via his embedded in-brain network connection, then called out from behind.

  “Well done, Yuri Industrievich. I look forward to your further briefings.”

  The man missed a step, surprised by the familiarity of being called by his personal names, which he had not provided. But he didn’t glance back, which pleased the President even more. He quite enjoyed a capable underling.

  Though he made a note to watch that Industrievich didn’t get chatty with the League. Scientists. Their allegiance owed to their own international commune of fellow tunnel vision devotees, the micro-world of left-handed radio wave pulsar cosmologists or whatever, instead of true patriotism. Though not, Voronin judged, nearly so foolish as to provide intelligence to the enemy on Luna. There was indiscretion, and then there was treason.

  4

  It’s difficult to comprehend what Mahina was thinking – or rather, Ben Acosta’s Colony Corps – to approach Earth before first reunifying the Diaspora colonies. He was punching outside his weight class. David, meet Goliath.

  Sass’s 24-hour meeting with Ben proved awkward at best. First, they wished for their whole teams on screen. The tiny silvery screen of the instantaneous ansible wouldn’t work for that. They used full video from their respective galleys, subject to a 22-minute time lag.

  So the parties recorded their complete presentations in parallel in under 20 minutes, sending from Earth and Mars simultaneously.

  She wished Clay would stop playing with the dratted robo-mink and look professional. But without their ship AI, the ‘android’ pet actually set up the comms handshaking. Sass sorely missed her familiar ship AI. While Clay adored the luxurious white fur of his new friend Fidget, who in turn adored being stroked, fondled, cuddled and teased. At the moment, Clay amused the little weasel-beast by making him chase his own tail on the table.

  Why did she agree to this?

  Eli completed his presentation on Earth’s environmental status. Clouds veiled crucial components of their view, but their orbital passes overlapped enough for Porter to get fairly decent pictures spliced together for 60% of the planet surface. Under that remaining 40% could lie dangerous dragons.

  But they’d learned the main thing. The great coral reefs, the tropical rain forests, the marshes and mangroves – those biomes were gone. The northern forests, like her home in Upstate, remained in a degraded state. Sass couldn’t follow his discussion of how they’d evaluated phytoplankton, the weak oxygen production of the vast oceans. And though Zelda couldn’t sample the atmosphere yet, she could discern gross composition in silhouette.

  “In summary, we expect oxygen levels below the minimum for humans to breathe. Most familiar fauna expected to be extinct. We see little evidence of human occupation in the southern hemisphere, only the northern. And most of that lies above the 38th parallel. And below the 66th parallel, the polar dark. No open-air agriculture observed, but it’s late in the season. Many dome communities.” The botanist took his seat.

  “Thank you, Eli,” Sass acknowledged. She placed before-and-after images of Lake Michigan on the screen. “We have another challenge. Earth has a satellite defense grid, actively firing. We suspect this is why. This new crater where Chicago used to be,” she flipped the image, “and another at Beijing,” again, “and the one-time sites of Paris and Moscow. There might be others. We think they withstood an asteroid bombardment from the space colonies. Luna threw rocks at them. Big ones.”

  “At least a decade ago,” Porter suggested. “For them to fill with water.”

  Sass nodded. “And also time to deploy the satellite lasers.” She put a schematic of the defense constellation on the screen, complete with altitude, velocity, spacing, and the power and timing of their strikes. “Ben, if you fly the gamut by eye, the guns are fairly weak if you stick to the seam-lines equidistant between them. Which isn’t easy.”

  Her chief engineer Darren addressed his counterpart on Ben’s team. “Remi, that’s simply the expected falloff as the square of distance. The guns hurt even at that ‘seam’ spacing.”

  “Right. Darren, explain your lambda whoop.”

  He took over the screen with a ship schematic and briefly explained how he’d mimicked a lambda whoop to confuse the guns, using Thrive’s star drive exhaust.

  Sass clamped her hand down on Clay’s arm and pursed her lips at him, to request he stop fidgeting with Fidget. Chastened, he leaned down to whisper in the beast’s ear. Then the agile mink scampered down the table to stand on its hind legs, gazing rapt at the screen in happy anticipation.

  The captain mourned yet again the unwisdom of getting roped into a Nico Copeland-Acosta scheme, Ben’s adoptive son. Nico believed himself in love with Floki, the android emu on Ben’s ship, a being he constructed himself. Didn’t the term android mean man-like? Instead he started with an emu, building on an available chassis. Now contemplating children, Floki dithered, like all incipient parents. They decided to start with pet minks and work up to…emus? Sass hadn’t dared ask, sure her smiling poker face would crack.

  Darren wrapped up with the cost-benefit analysis on the lambda whoop.

  “Thank you,” she acknowledged, checking her time. “Bottom line, Ben, we can’t afford to stay in orbit another day. Threats are manageable. And I won’t leave this planet without atmospheric readings. So we land. There was an island nation, Bermuda. Most of the island remains above sea level, but its dome is broken open. No other sign of habitation. I plan to start there for basic science. Landing in a few hours. Then continue to Upstate. Sass out.”

  Having squeaked in under the time limit, her team briefly stretched around the table. Sass contemplated doing something about the mink, but gave it up. No doubt Fidget was painfully eager to see its daddy and brother on Ben’s ship. It’s just that the optics –

  Yes, exactly. The screen came alive with Ben’s broadcast. Because Ben and Sass both sat at the heads of their respective dining tables, farthest from the screen, the captains showed up smallest. The central figure, up close to the camera, was a black-brown sable mink, Fidget’s twin Lenka, larger than life on the wall-spanning display.

  Fidget crooned mournfully, and swayed, greeting this image of her brother 22 minutes after the fact.

  “Clay!” Sass gritted. “The mink.”

  He retrieved the moaning beast while Sass leaned forward to hear Ben, somewhat occluded by Lenka. Mercifully, the emu ordered the mink to go sit with him.

  That distraction resolved, Sass focused on Ben’s tale, lips pursed, and shook her head. Someone would end up evacuating 12,000 Martians and bringing them to the home system, she could see it now. She’d been that someone who took over for half of the last job, 40,000 from planet Denali resettled to Mahina, after Ben worked himself to a nervous breakdown carrying the first 30,000. He hadn’t left her in the lurch after that. He solved their lack of support infrastructure, so Sass could focus on transporting immigrants. They succeeded.

  Neither of them was eager to do it again.

  Ben’s comments concluded with the same prediction.

  The surprise came after. His engineer Remi Roy sat forward and said, “With respect, cap. Maybe they should transport to Sagamore instead. Give Mahina time to absorb the last group.”

  Sass’s j
aw dropped. Carry the Martians to a slave-owning world? But her reaction wouldn’t reach them yet.

  “Thank you, Remi,” Ben acknowledged. “I agree that’s where we’re headed.” Sass shook her head angrily, as they’d see in 22 minutes. “But we’re not there yet. And today, a first meet and greet. Who knows?

  “So Sass, that’s where we’re at. I’ll dangle tempting bits of medical aid, small samples.” He waved to Sanjay, his medical researcher, to give a brief preview of the Martians’ health status, based only on video calls. His preliminary verdict was ‘challenged,’ typical of space colonies. He anticipated Mars was not quite as bad as Mahina settlers of only twenty years ago, when Thrive first headed to space seeking solutions.

  Ben resumed, “Here’s where you come in. Mars confirms Luna and Earth are still inhabited, a few million and a bazillion respectively. They don’t know Earth’s population. And the Martians already warned Luna that we’re here. We believe that’s no skin off our nose. Luna can’t reach Mars for months. But. They know the ‘Colony Corps’ is around. I didn’t mention you, and I won’t. But expect Earth to be more alert. I suspect Earth and Luna are not friends, but I have no details.

  “I’d like to suggest again, that you abort and come join us here. For safety. Learn more.” He tilted his head. “And I know you won’t. But once I engage on Mars, it gets harder to break off and come fetch you. Floki?”

  The emu nodded gratefully and turned to Sass in entreaty. “Lenka and I are very anxious. Is Enka contributing? Did she perform adequately as an AI substitute on the bridge during entry?”

  Ben waved to indicate an open minute to reply.

  Sass forced herself to beam a smile. “Fidget wasn’t on the bridge. We renamed him. I didn’t realize he was a she.” Anatomically, the furry device was blank in that regard, though it purred and wriggled in ecstasy when Clay rubbed her nether parts. “Clay and Fidget have bonded. He – she – slept with us last night.”