by Ginger Booth
She waded into the water, able to enjoy the push and pull of the waves, if not teasing her skin directly. At waist deep, she was past the churn from the waves breaking. She skimmed a surface sample. In her suit, she couldn’t reach a two-meter depth, because the suit’s air would pop her up like a cork. But she reached as low as she could push her arms down, and collected another vial.
Helmet face breaking the water’s surface, she could study the seabed around her boots. She kicked a little to watch the billowing streamers of sand. But she saw no hermit crabs, no fish.
Reminded, she hurried to splash out of the water to bring the samples for testing. No, this Earth wasn’t the one she left. Though she began to wonder if she actually knew that world, or remained as clueless as the kindergartner in Prospect Park. In her day-to-day police rounds through the tent cities, mostly she trudged head-down in a poncho, pulling her boots from sucking mud. Her view was a narrow band between rebreather and dripping hood. And her outlook at the end was a bottomless pit of depression. To keep putting one foot in front of the other seemed all she could manage.
Funny how much she’d forgotten.
The sun suddenly darkened. She looked up to see a bank of roiling cloud massing above the island chain.
“Captain, the wind is increasing,” Darren complained from the ship.
“Everyone on the shuttle! Now!” she called ahead, and started to run.
6
Androids from the Aloha system favored animal models over human. Earth and Luna developed humanoid models as surrogate soldiers, then later fought a war of extermination and banned them.
“You are unbelievable, Collier!” Clay yelled at his partner, lover, and captain over comms. “Irresponsible, reckless. Idiot!”
Fidget, whom he was presently trying to shampoo in a sample tray on the sand, mewled piteously. He’d been too rough on her while venting his aggravation. Liam pushed him aside and took over the washing. He plucked soapy wads of white mink fur out of the shallow water and flicked them away.
Clay stood abruptly. “Gear, Eli, Zelda, Liam, me. Into the shuttle. Now!”
“Fidget is a member of our crew,” Sass attempted, still jogging up the beach.
“Yes, she is! And how did you pulling off your helmet help her?”
“I don’t know. Did it?”
Yes, but Clay wasn’t about to admit it. He shut the outer lock door. “Zelda, open your box. The chemicals need to reach all surfaces for bio containment.”
Sass burst out, “Oh, for crying out loud, Clay! We evolved on this planet!”
Clay hit the wash cycle button. This buffeted their spacesuits with anti-biologics in sheets of water. “Yes, Sass. Our diseases evolved here, too. Most of the crew have never been exposed. Ever hear the term ‘virgin field’?”
“Clay, there aren’t even birds on this island! No people!”
“You don’t know that. Sass, I’ve been to Bermuda before –”
She huffed a sour laugh. “Of course you have!”
“– For work! Yes, Sass, I had money. Not enough to buy in here. Bermuda was a tax haven, arks for the super-rich. Let’s sound off. Who votes for letting Sass enter Thrive without passing biotainment?”
Liam: “No.”
Eli: “Hell, no!”
Porter: “Sass, think of the crops!”
Zelda: “It’s Fidget too!”
“That’s true,” Clay noted glumly. “Sorry, Fidget, this might hurt.” Outside his suit, the airlock begin its temperature scales, first baking them to 120 °C. Next they’d be blasted with -70 °C. After that basic cycle they’d check the sensors.
“Ow, it’s starting to rain,” Sass complained.
“Ow?” Clay asked. How did rain hurt through a spacesuit? He peered out the modest window. Indeed, raindrops pelted down hard enough to leave little craters wide as his thumb, with sand flying from them. The remaining crew huddled against the side of the shuttle with the mink. “Sass, Darren’s in trouble flying the ship! I need to get up there!”
“I didn’t say that,” Darren interjected mildly. “I was concerned about you. Thrive is fine. You’re kinda screwed. Are you seeing this on sensors?”
“Not into the shuttle yet,” Clay growled. He set a good example by picking up his boots one after the other to flash-dry. “What are we facing?”
“A storm formed out of nothing over the island chain. Damnedest thing. It forms into a point of puffy white cloud on the other end. On your end, it’s nasty.”
“I think we noticed that.”
“Did you see the waterspouts?” Darren inquired.
Sass pounded on the door. “Clay! Let us in now!”
“No. You’re going through biotainment. It’s a pain in the ass decontaminating the shuttle.”
Liam inquired, “Have you two been married long?”
“We’re not married!” Clay and Sass barked simultaneously. They glared at each other through the window.
“Ah!” Liam checked his biologics sensor. “We pass.” He aborted the cycle to let the humans into the seating area.
“Kaol, don’t let her in,” Clay ordered, as he shut the inner door.
“Sorry, captain,” Kaol said regretfully. “And the um, mink?”
“Sass can wash her.” Clay sat to the helm, racking his helmet on the back of the chair. He used the external cameras to look around, displaying the view on the windshield for the others.
Liam sat beside him. “How do you decontaminate the shuttle?”
“I don’t know. Corky deals with it.” Their housekeeper had been with them on and off since planet Sanctuary – years. A detached inner voice he didn’t much like supplied, eight years subjective, twenty objective.
Liam didn’t take his bitten-out hint. “Seems awkward, to put seven people through the airlock in three waves. Inflexible.” With their helmets off, this wasn’t broadcast to Sass, still being pelted by fat rain gobs, shielding Fidget on her tray against the side of the boat. “Will you keep it up? Or just use it to punish Sass?”
Clay shot him a glower. Yes, the paddy was trying to get a rise out of him. He grimaced and tapped the control panel. “I’ll apologize to everyone once we’re back on the same comms.”
Liam shrugged. “It’s a small ship. Family I was told. Tiptoeing around because mama and papa fish are mad – it’s uncomfortable.”
“You’re very pushy for a paddy.”
“If I weren’t pushy, I’d still be a paddy. Now I’m a doctor. And a Mahina citizen.”
“Sorry. Yes.”
“Keep your marital squabbles in bed, Clay. If you can’t, perhaps counseling.” Liam leaned in close and whispered. “Consider it a threat.” Then he shifted to his normal seat as Kaol and Porter burst in from the airlock.
Maybe we should have taken a getting-to-know-you cruise. But why would they? Everyone else on board had worked together before. The doctor was a last-minute swap after their previous choice backed out. And he was willing to depart immediately.
Clay checked the control panel and a camera instead of talking to Sass on the comms. The woman and mink were in, and she wasn’t hailing him.
Fidget retreated into a corner, bent almost double. Sass took off her helmet and got down on hands and knees, butt in the air. She touched noses with the adorable creature. She spoke softly and calmed her fears. Then she set the suit tourniquet on her forearm and removed the one glove she’d contaminated. She shifted up to her knees to pull down the decontamination hose and transfer the drawer of chemicals to their level. And she settled in to wash her hair and arm. Obviously they didn’t use the car-wash settings on bare-skinned people. They washed by hand until they passed the sensors.
She propped her helmet against the corner and filled it for a bath for the mink to wash herself. In a few minutes, Fidget bounded out of the helmet, so Sass could refill and dump it to rinse the hideous decon shampoo from her hair. Then she played a squirt game with the hose to rinse the mink. With Fidget feeling happier, she gently r
olled the mink onto her back to rub her tummy, then open its hatch to irrigate her innards and orifices.
Then Sass reached up to hit the tester. Apparently she’d been thorough. The airlock automatically unlatched, its indicator light green.
She tenderly shut Fidget’s access panel, then adopted hands and knees again to kiss her head. Then she opened the door to set the mink free while she racked the cleaning implements, blond hair darkened and dripping around her ears.
“Everyone,” Clay announced. “I apologize for my outburst. Sass, especially to you.” He lunged to catch Fidget before she could launch onto the unlocked control panel. “No. Only when someone holds you.”
Fidget took this as an invitation to twine around his neck, warm and stinking of the tar-like black decon soap developed for Denali’s ravening microbes. The furball lay cold and damp, and purred like a motor.
Kaol volunteered to tidy the airlock instead of the captain. She took her seat beside Clay as though nothing untoward had happened. She opened the comms. “Darren, you need me up there?”
“No. Take your time, captain. The storm seems to be dying out at the other end of the island. It may blow over soon.”
“Thank you, chief.”
“Apology not accepted?” Clay prompted.
“Done and forgotten,” his beloved claimed, with a sunny smile. From long experience, he interpreted this as, You’re a jerk, and you’ll pay later. “Why did you visit Bermuda for work?”
“You remember a big scandal, maybe a decade before we left. A team sold poisoned rebreathers. They made them out of the three most trusted brands.”
She froze an instant. He knew that feeling, receiving memories long dormant, yet eerily clear when reinstated. When I feel like the android I am. She nodded. “Thousands died, right? One of my old army buddies lost her husband. That has what to do with Bermuda?”
“The perps ran here with their profits. We came to collect.”
She shot him a hard glance. “And you found they worked for the government, just like you.”
And you, he thought sourly. Granted a beat cop worked much farther down the pecking order. “We killed them anyway.”
“Good.” She pulled back the stick and they headed up, still flying low. Waterspouts frolicked in the inner lagoon. She took a turn around one to marvel at it. Then she banked and headed out from under the cloud. Blue sky reigned, not 10 klicks from the island tempest in a teacup.
“That’s the damnedest thing,” he murmured.
“Bermuda’s not the same,” Sass suggested. “And you thought I was mean to the rodent.”
Fidget murmured, “Mink belongs to the Mustelidae family. Not order Rodentia. Minks are carnivores.”
Clay laughed softly and gentled the creature’s flank. “Good to know.”
“Fidget, I didn’t spit on you to be mean,” Sass explained. “I wanted to get the nasty ocean water off your face, because it was hurting you. Your eyes were scrunched in pain, and I know how sensitive your nose and whiskers are. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“You’re nice,” Fidget replied, all forgiven. She was growing toasty around Clay’s neck. Perhaps she could steam herself dry.
“Sass?” Porter hazarded, after their make-up session clearly hit a lull. “The sand line reaches twenty meters above mean high water. More or less.”
“So the whole island was inundated,” Eli suggested. “And the domes collapsed? That would take quite a storm.”
Sass brought them around to the broken dome area, a low hump of a ridge above a second broken-open lagoon. A taller hill rose above the sound, but that one appeared undeveloped.
“Oh!” Clay remembered a tourist attraction. “Fidget, where were the Crystal Caves on Bermuda?” Bingo. The mink highlighted the dome ruins, extending underwater. “We’d probably need diving suits to see them. But they were worth it. Fidget, show some pictures.”
Sass pushed the images off to his side of the viewscreen to keep her own clear, but she leaned over to take a look. These were glorious caves, with pastel colored walls of massed stalactites and stalagmites, like a pipe organ of tinted ivory in an organic cathedral. “Gorgeous. Not today.”
“They might still be sealed off from the ocean,” Clay said hopefully.
She shot him a look. No. No one had time for that while the oceans rose. They looked to save their own skins, not natural wonders.
The shards of the dome betrayed no obvious structures where people might have sheltered after whatever catastrophe broke it open. Sass hovered a few meters above a section she found intriguing, or maybe she just thought she could land there. Fewer broken walls littered the ground.
“Goals?” Clay asked. “What do we hope to gain if we go in?” It was still raining, but softly. The storm cloud began to dissipate, light brightening.
“Rain sample,” Sass suggested. “Radiation and such measurements. Maybe a database we could filch. Safer than talking to people. Who might call other people.”
“That’s worth it,” Eli voted. Kaol and Zelda nodded their heads emphatically.
“Agreed,” Clay said. “What do you say, Fidget? You and me, hunt for yummy data?”
“Mmm!”
“Sass, will you join us?” Clay invited wistfully.
“I dunno, Clay. Gonna be a rego ass all day?”
He sighed. “Probably. This place. Sass, it was gorgeous. I walked this land. Toured the caves below. The elite domes. The gardens. The…birds.” They hadn’t seen as much as a rat. Only insects, wind and waves and wildflowers.
She reached over and squeezed his hand. Her hedgehog demeanor softened. “Yeah. You’re OK.”
Clay couldn’t agree. He hadn’t felt this unsettled in a long time. So many memories flooded back that hadn’t resurfaced in decades. He gulped.
7
The brutality of the 21st century cannot be overstated. The Northern League formed to save the planet by bringing its human population to a sustainable level. Over 6 billion people had to die.
Ben smiled confidently at the delegation caught in his airlock, his guests for lunch. But the telltale light above the door remained red. His courier ship Psyche succeeded at mating with a standard docking tunnel to Mars One. But the door wouldn’t open.
“Remi?” Ben asked.
The engineer stepped forward to investigate, while Ben explained to their three visitors how to use the intercom button so they could talk through the seal. He asked them to wait while he conferred.
In low tones, Remi explained, “The city air pressure is 30% lower than ours. I can equalize it. But will it hurt them?”
Ben turned his back on his guests and summoned Sanjay, his medic. Not that they ordinarily carried a doctor. Sanjay joined for the scientific mission.
The neurologist frowned. “There could be discomfort, but not harm. I think.”
“Could we lower our pressure to match theirs?”
Sanjay was more confident of this answer, and shook his head. So did Remi. “Like altitude sickness. We’d feel very unwell.”
“So we can’t walk around their city?” Ben objected. “We need pressure suits in the corridors?”
“Let’s split the difference.” Remi adjusted a setting. The guests started contorting their faces.
Ben recoiled. “Remi, stop!”
Fortunately, Sanjay realized what he was seeing. He pressed the intercom. “Try yawning. Your ears will pop. Is this too uncomfortable?”
“We can handle it,” Groot claimed.
Remi went slowly, and brought them all the way to Psyche’s Earth-normal, sea-level air. No one’s ears started bleeding, and at last the telltale turned green. He also kindly reset the courier ship’s gravity to the Martian one-third g as a courtesy, just in case.
Ben hauled the door open immediately. “Sorry for the holdup!” He introduced his team, starting with those already standing by the door, then continued on to his physicist Teke, ‘computer’ specialist Hugo, security man Wilder, and Tikki Cook, who p
rovided the small feast.
The local variation on a handshake turned out to be right fist punched into left palm at the sternum, accompanied by a curt head bob. Ben made sure he mastered the gesture. The two bald Denali traded their own steepled prayer-fingers gesture. The others left it at a respectful nod.
In turn, Ben was re-introduced to young Lt. Rover, and a stern-looking woman intermediate in age, the ‘CIO’ Mila Montrose, ‘from the Board.’ The captain wasn’t sure what they meant, but chose to follow up later.
“My apologies for the lock,” Ben excused. “Every other dome we’ve visited chose Earth sea-level normal pressure.” He waved the guests to the plank-wood picnic benches flanking a matching table, erected in mid-hold. Psyche offered bunks for six. Merchant Thrive’s mop closet offered more room than the courier’s galley.
Gus stroked a finger along the table top.
“Uh, careful,” Ben warned. “You might get splinters.”
“Is this wood?” Mila asked, clearly in awe.
Ben blinked. He’d expect anyone to be awed at Tikki’s cooking, but the table was raw boards set on sawhorses. “Ah, yes. From my homeworld.”
Groot pounced. “Which is where?”
“Please be seated,” Ben insisted, taking the single folding chair at the head. “We’re not going to answer that question.” He smiled to soften the statement. “We’re here now, and that’s all that matters.” He served himself some sliced fresh fruit, then passed the platter to his right. His crew followed suit. The guests earnestly studied their example. Mila struggled to apply tongs.
Sass was the first to realize this opportunity on Thrive, but now every PO-3 asteroid hopper maintained a kitchen garden under the waste light from their star drives. Following in mentor’s example, Ben’s Merchant grew fruit trees and berries as well.
Tikki graciously explained what each dish was.
But Ben noticed the Martians seemed unfamiliar with anything he said. “Let me try. That’s fruit. That’s bread, made from protein powder. Tikki, the meat is also –? No, I guess that’s real meat. Salad vegetables. Sweet potatoes. The noodles are made of wheat.”
