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

by Ginger Booth

  Yes, this would be a challenging evening. “I –”

  The lieutenant stopped and held up a wait finger. He looked distracted. Sass feared he was receiving new instructions.

  17

  At first welcoming, gradually the northern nations felt they were being overrun. Sympathy for the migrant plight turned to hatred.

  Sass flicked her eyes to her guard Kaol with a microscopic head-shake as their escort Three-Eight stood, eyes unfocused. Here in the midst of Killingfield’s labyrinthine corridors, without the ability to operate the airlocks, she needed to talk them out of here.

  The wolf lieutenant’s attention returned to Sass sourly. “The Assistant Dictator will see you now.”

  Given the time lag on his distraction, Sass imagined that far more content had changed hands than that simple request. She needed to get on top of this fast. “And I’m eager to meet him. Riu, isn’t it? But he doesn’t want to speak to all of us. Why don’t you and Ivett continue to the ship? I’ll catch up.” She beamed a smile.

  Three-Eight’s lip curled up in a sneer. “You shot down jets.”

  “I did,” Sass agreed promptly. “We had a communications problem. They tried to shoot me down. I tried to hail them, tried to evade. And I deeply regret the loss of life and valuable vehicles.”

  She suspected the latter weighed heavier in the eyes of the Dictator. But not, perhaps, for a soldier. “That’s why we welcomed the opportunity to meet with you. To establish comms to avoid further incidents.”

  She put every ounce of sincerity she could muster into her plea, but Three-Eight was a man under orders. She thought fast. “Don’t you want to see inside my ship? Communication is more than handshaking protocols and wavelengths. It requires understanding each other, walking a mile the other’s shoes. Please, Three-Eight, accept our hospitality tonight. Let my people return to Thrive, and join them.”

  Kaol suggested softly, “I want to show you crew berthing. I mean, I share a cabin. It’s not much, but the shower room is great. And I can snack anytime. My metabolism runs kinda high.”

  Sass smiled warmly at her shy bouncer. “Eli can show you my gardens.”

  The botanist picked up his cue smoothly. “Sass was the first to realize that the waste light from our star drive could be used for fresh vegetables on a PO-3. Now all of our spacecraft do it.”

  Darren smiled in a friendly way. The engineer would not be offering tours of his bailiwick. “Our housekeeper Corky is a superb cook.”

  “Housekeeper?”

  Sass assured him, “My ship is like a family home, not military. Please. Accept our hospitality.” And get my people out of here. “Wouldn’t this be valuable to the Dictator, too? Reconnaissance on the inside provided by an experienced soldier of your caliber?”

  Unfortunately that left Sass without even an acquaintance inside the dome. On the other hand, what skin off Killingfield’s nose if she downed a few jets? Surely they weren’t from this podunk town. If number 38 was this young lieutenant, she estimated Killingfield’s total military at somewhere south of a thousand, more likely a few hundred. What they did for a living remained unclear, but she bet it mostly involved keeping their own locals cowed.

  The wolf man looked tempted, and his gaze grew unfocused again. “Alright. The captain will meet with the Dictator alone. But I warn you. If you’re hoping Ivett and I have hostage value, think again.”

  Ivett bounced a little, casting furtive glances up and down the corridor. The academic never seemed enthused about this field trip. Tough, ruled Sass.

  “Never entered my mind.” She flourished an arm onward. “Can I see my people to the airlock? Split off for my interview with the Dictator after?” He agreed with a sharp nod. “Excellent. And you’ll introduce me to my escort? I would hate to make any mistakes, offer any accidental insult, to the Dictator. You know me a little by now, lieutenant. Clueless straggler, clearly harmless.”

  They marched faster now, perhaps in a rush to deliver Sass to the Dictator on time. Sass continued her wheedling along the way, with breaks for staircases and passing strangers. The corridors grew crowded with people who averted their gaze instead of staring at them. Sass tried to tell herself this was a sign of a well-ordered society. But she knew the sort of browbeating involved. Killingfield was not a happy town.

  Lynx-Ears, apparently named Second Lieutenant Four-One, met them at the airlock. Sass sighed relief as her people entered the vestibule and reclaimed their belongings. Those had shifted slightly, probably inspected in their absence. She touched Kaol’s sleeve. “No worries. Tell Clay not to hold up dinner for me. And don’t let Fidget shed on the lieutenant.”

  The Denali guard looked anguished, but hid it in donning his face mask. Eli’s eyes were somber. Darren, a more cheerful type, was inured to Sass taking risks, getting killed, and coming back from the dead. She judged him simply grateful to return to the ship alive with his fingernail scrapings.

  The heavy inner door closed, but she continued to watch through the window until her charges made it through the stone outer door. “Sorry to hold you up, Four-One. Now I’m relying on you to teach me local customs, yes? For instance, would I offend the Dictator by touching him?”

  She touched Four-One’s hand. He snatched it away in alarm. That’s a yes.

  Assistant Dictator Riu’s office was a hushed and sumptuous affair larger than Ivett’s apartment, a fact that surprised Sass not at all. Even his end of the dome had been more spacious, with potted plants and wide spots in the halls with conversational groupings of furniture. She’d visited a hotel once in Albany with such furnishings, hushed nooks that no one seemed to use. Not that she’d been invited into rooms like this one, but she caught glimpses when the maids were cleaning.

  She blew out and pursed her lips at the raised velvet patten on the wallpaper. This was more up Clay’s alley. But she’d do her best.

  “You sit,” Four-One directed, not a chatty guy. He himself held up a wall, shrinking from the giant wooden desk.

  She hoped he was correct on that advice. She perched forward, back erect in her best posture, on an overstuffed leather armchair, the fanciest furniture she’d ever touched. The ping-pong-table expanse of the desk stretched before her, of some dark wood likely extinct now in the tropics. Eli hadn’t found rain forests.

  She jumped up like a rifle bullet, and spun as the door opened behind her. Riu strolled in and took his seat. Only then did he pat air to bid her sit again. She rubbed sweat from her hands on her pants, but attempted to glue on a smile.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Assistant Director – no, Assistant Dictator Riu. I’m not used to such…grandeur.” She gulped. “I’m a simple farmer and spaceship captain from a simple world.”

  His facial muscles remained as implacable as his metal eyes. “Cut the bullshit, captain. Your ship shot down several jets. And satellites.”

  “Yes, and I regret that.”

  “And you were born on Earth.”

  “Yes. But not in a dome like yours.” She couldn’t claim to be a straggler, since she wasn’t sure what the term implied. “I came to Upstate as a child.” She fought her urge to babble out her life history. “I was a cop. Patrolling a tent city near here, a police detective. Then I won the lottery to join the Diaspora.”

  “And a century later, you return to Earth to revisit your roots. I don’t care.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I care very much about the Northern League’s jets. Or rather, they care and are attempting to make this my problem.”

  “The Northern League,” Sass echoed. “They’re still…? I see.”

  She didn’t know much about the League, save they were the last power standing in North America when she exited this world. Her army unit probably answered up a food chain to them, as did the police. But the nose-bleed section of society mattered little to one Sassafras Collier, and she to them.

  “In my defense, sir –”

  “There is no excuse.”

  “
Yes, sir, but I attempted to contact them, and was unable to do so. That’s why I was grateful to receive an invitation to Killingfield. To learn your comms frequencies so that we might…annoy people less. Like the Northern League.”

  “You’re still alive,” he noted. “I retrieved your records.”

  With a finger-flick, a photo of her took over a smart wall, hunched and red-eyed, hanging her head as two cop buddies supported her on either side, all three in wet grey-brown coats under an rain awning. Hair looping out of a ponytail, haphazardly thrust into her collar, she appeared twenty years older in that picture than she did today. Her heart panged, and her attempt to smile fled.

  “That was my son’s funeral.” She swallowed. “He was fourteen.” Her voice vanished halfway through the sentence. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Overdose.”

  “I don’t care,” he reminded her, “what squalid little life you led. My interest is your age in this picture, versus your apparent age now.”

  Bastard. Her eyes shot to his, betraying raw rage she feared. Cool it, Collier. She dropped her eyes to her lap. “Would you mind removing that picture, please. In the interest of…efficiency.”

  He did so. “Why do you appear in your early twenties, captain?”

  She scratched her cheek, trying to regain self-control. What a time to have old beaten-down habits return to her. The memories flooding back of that awful week were not readily thrust out of the way. And the endless rage against people such as this man, who prospered while her kind struggled to even breathe.

  He demanded an explanation. Fair enough. But her voice came out gravelly to her ears. “There was a scientist, Belker. On the Vitality, my colony ship out of here. He performed an experiment on a dozen of us, testing advanced medical nanites. Without permission, not from us, not his command chain either. Most of us died within hours. Some survived and became…self-healing.”

  “You became younger. And stayed that way.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will –”

  “You won’t find it,” she blurted. Screw playing nice, she met his blank eyes squarely. “Believe me, scientists have looked for decades. They were never able to reverse engineer what Belker did to us. I expected…well, I thought Earth was dead. Except for some few holdouts I could maybe help.”

  “You came back, light years. To see if you could help poor Earth.”

  Sass recognized dully that she spoke to a man incapable of understanding. “Yes.” She left it at that.

  “Perhaps our scientists are better than yours. Four-One, the doctor is waiting.”

  “Wait!” Sass barked. “I’d hoped this would be a friendly conversation –”

  “You’re a fool, Captain Collier.”

  “Maybe,” she allowed. “But I am a fool with resources. I don’t wish to make this a threat –”

  “But you will.”

  “My ship is an asteroid miner. She’s already shot your best jets out of the sky. And my partner, my lover, might get…concerned…if I do not return home tonight.”

  Riu shrugged. “Take her to the doctor.”

  So be it. Sass rose slowly, glaring at him. She’d given fair warning. She owed him no more than that. She strode to the door and waited for Four-One to open it. The hapless lieutenant frowned uneasily, but she couldn’t help him with that. Sure, she could run away, play hide-and-seek through the dome until she could find the magic words to open an airlock door.

  But the quickest route out of here probably began with the doctor. A medical type might possess some compassion. What a hope.

  18

  Borders to the south were hardened and fortified. In the Eastern Hemisphere, that region of the globe was already mired in never-ending conflict, which worsened.

  “You will lie down,” the doctor informed Sass, not looking around from his display blazed across the wall. His eyes were blank metal like Riu’s, though his band extended to the nape of his neck, encasing his brain. A examination cot awaited, well-equipped with straps.

  Four-One stood by the door. Unlike Riu and the doctor, Sass suspected the lynx-eared one understood her warning, that Clay could open fire on the dome. They probably assumed he wouldn’t do so because she was still in here.

  But she wouldn’t die of it. They would. How Clay would balance that equation depended more on Three-Eight, Ivett, and his read on how much he’d be inconvenienced waiting for her to heal and return to duty. Not very, she suspected. She had an embedded tracker. Once they retrieved her body from the dome wreckage, he’d simply toss her on their shared bed, then hit Go on her preset program to flee Earth. She might or might not regain consciousness before rendezvous with Ben.

  She was actually fighting for this idiot doctor’s life here, not her own, plus his entire community. And she was confident he deserved her consideration not one whit.

  “I will not,” she replied, taking a seat on a stool instead. She gave it a test whirl and roll. Its hardware looked nothing like the bare steel examination stools of her army days, but the functionality remained. She inspected it for an elevator function. That worked, suddenly jetting the seat upward. Fortunately it provided foot-rests, since her legs couldn’t reach the floor.

  “You can have a single blood sample. That’s it.” She held onto the seat and extended a foot down to give the stool a nudge, sending it hovering across the room to his equipment cabinet. She rummaged through a few steel cabinets and selected a couple sharps, scalpel and nightmare-sized syringe. She resumed her seat and calmly screwed a disposable needle onto its plunger.

  “Security!” barked the doctor in outrage. Now he looked at her.

  Sass glanced over her shoulder at Four-One, who held a blaster on her, perplexed. Thought so. If she threatened him, the youth would fire that blaster like a berserker, probably killing the doctor, himself, and Sass, and wreck the room. So she didn’t look at him, provided no challenge to anyone. “Would you like me to draw blood myself?” she offered calmly. “Hopefully not with this needle.”

  She slit her wrist with the scalpel, then held it above the counter. Severed arteries gushed out a palm-sized puddle, slowed to a drip, then done. She blotted off excess blood with her sleeve. Then she stared straight into the doctor’s metal eyes. She didn’t even know this creature’s name.

  Nor did she want to know. His chances of surviving the next few minutes were iffy. The tent rat had no sympathy. “Blood. Take it from the counter. Or give me something to take a controlled sample.”

  “Your wrist,” he stammered, “it already…stopped bleeding?”

  She made a show of examining it. She licked it clean and buffed it on her pants leg. “Yup.” She shifted her sharp to the other hand, then displayed the wrist on Four-One’s side to satisfy his curiosity, favoring him with half-smile.

  “Doctor, give her a syringe,” the lynx man begged. His blaster swung in the doctor’s direction, and jerked up to indicate the cabinets.

  “I wasn’t asking for a blood sample!” the foolish physician blurted. “I’m to examine her.”

  Sass zipped down her uniform shirt and spread her arms wide. She wore bra and T-shirt under that outer pressure layer. “Feast your eyes! All done.” She re-zipped the jacket. “I am healthy, strong, apparent age maybe same as him.” She tipped her head in Four-One’s direction. “That’s all you get.”

  “You don’t –!” The doctor yanked a drawer open, and pulled out a pistol-like device, training it on her, likely a medical sensor.

  Bad move, Sass thought, just as Four-One blasted his head off. Gore spattered across the room, to drip from walls and table. Sass sighed. “For the record, I’m not the one who killed the doctor. Four-One, it’s time to get us out of here.”

  Her pocket vibrated silently, no doubt some message from Clay. She ignored it. She tossed her sharps on the counter, and turned the stool to face Four-One, empty hands in the air. “I surrender. It’s your life I need to save now.” The buzz from her first mate promptly ceased. Yes, Clay, I’m
busy!

  “What?” the 2nd looie asked dumbly, whites shining around his eyes as he drank in the carnage he’d wrought in horror.

  “You just murdered a doctor,” Sass observed gently. “But I promise not to hold it against you. You’re welcome to stay on my ship tonight. But we need to get out of here. Like, right this instant. Put the weapon down. Just holster it. Or toss it on the body.”

  The stunned youth gaped at the blaster, then flung it on the doctor’s remains. “Oh my god oh my god oh my –”

  “Keep it together,” Sass crooned, sliding down to her feet, still one hand raised placatingly. “It can be OK. We need to reach an airlock. And you need to open it. One with breath masks.”

  Please don’t bolt on me, she begged silently, holding his gaze with her own. This all got much uglier if he flipped out and ran screaming into the halls. She stepped slowly to block the door, facing it. “Ready? Stick your finger into the middle of my back. Pretend it’s a gun. And we walk calmly and steadily to the nearest airlock. Be sure and give me directions. Right, left, like that.”

  She steeled her nerve, and pulled open the door. Alas a nurse stood there, bearing a metal tray of drugs and paraphernalia. She caught one glimpse of the gore-flecked room behind Sass and dropped the tray. Metal clattered to the hard tile floor and vials rolled away. And she screamed.

  “Run!” Sass instructed her captor. She led off, shoving other medical staff out of her way. She darted into a hallway angling away from Riu’s office. At this juncture, she didn’t care whether Four-One followed or not. She couldn’t save him from himself forever. But at the next turn, she glanced back to find the heavy footfalls chasing her were his.

  That made some things harder, others easier. But she’d help him live if she could. Though truth to tell, the Earth memories were resurrecting some of her old home outlook. Screw off, I don’t take passengers.

  The warble of alarms broke out, with flashing red strobe lights at the intersections. Thanks, I’d wondered what your signals were for that, she though sourly.