by Ginger Booth
“Pontiac has committed to deliver you to Hakone,” Melkor excused this ruling as they boarded this morning, never venturing into unshielded open air. “Your ship and crew are unharmed. But we fear that if you were reunited now, you might not reach Hakone.”
Their host was diplomatic, Sass had to give him that. She never even had a chance to spot Thrive at the airport, because the deluxe diplomatic flyer took off from the Bronze Ziggurat.
The vessel they used was comfortable, beautifully appointed with generous windows and seats made to recline fully for napping. The cabin was spacious, but cluttered with seating for a couple dozen instead of the three of them.
She nodded off, Fidget in her arms, as Clay and Melkor probed ever deeper into geopolitics and the history of the past century. Sass wasn’t nearly the intellectual her lover was. She gazed out the window when cloud cover allowed. Manitoba pretty much merged into a single swamp. Saskatchewan and Alberta blazed bright, barren high desert, and the Rockies looked dry and rugged. The girl from Upstate wasn’t familiar with this turf before the Diaspora. She dozed off to unbroken cloud cover as they approached the Pacific.
But the flyer needed to recharge at Anchorage, incapable of flying Pontiac to Hakone direct. Or perhaps the requirement was diplomatic rather than battery capacity. Melkor called Anchorage a ‘joint base.’
“I need exercise,” Sass announced, as an umbilical corridor thunked on. She’d hoped that here she might escape indoor life at last. But latter-day Anchorage proved a big city, a vast expanse of domed land like Pontiac. The coast had been packed with ships as well. “Is there any chance I could get out and run on the…” They weren’t parked on a runway, rather an open plaza between rugged buildings.
“I’m afraid not,” their guide replied.
“The umbilical,” Sass suggested. “I could run laps along the boarding ramp? I need a workout to restore full function.” She waved her newly regrown hand, and raised an ankle to flex in demonstration. She wasn’t lying. Her dexterity lagged until she got her heart pumping and limbs working to iron out the kinks.
Melkor pursed his lips, dubious, but relented. “Don’t interfere with lunch delivery. And do not attempt to pass the doors at the other end. Clay, you’ll remain here. You may take turns if you wish.”
“Thank you!” Sass bolted to her feet, artfully managing to trip over them. Fidget scampered ahead, eager to play too. “Whoa, girl, don’t wear yourself out too much!” The mink ignored the advice.
Her first lap, Sass jogged gently, soaking in the view out the corridor windows. Like the flyer, the airtight umbilical was pure VIP, with a rich Asian carpet hushing her footfalls. The blue sky outside cheered her, with fast-scudding puff clouds, as did the exercise. The parking atrium was utilitarian, except for directly ahead. Through the windows, she glimpsed a reception area both expensive and chintzy – fancy but in poor taste, rich in red and gold and fronds of potted plants.
Fidget stopped her bounds abruptly, and doubled back to a joint, where two shorter umbilicals became one. Sass’s heart beat faster, but she forced herself to continue running while the mink sniffed her heart out. On the way back, she ran ahead of the arriving lunch cart, then plastered herself against the wall by Fidget for it to pass, pretending to be winded. Once it passed, she did some burpees, kicking her legs across the passageway. As she sat for stretches, her pet licked her face, and nuzzled her ear.
“Thrive went north. Darren doesn’t know where yet. Ben says Luna wants an alliance against Earth.” The mink dropped down and scampered to inspect the joint on the other side.
Sass trusted she’d remember not to use her built-in gravity generator. A mink was hard enough to explain without the creature flying.
She leaned hard into a stretch on the other side, new-grown sinews and muscles tight. She struggled to think of an innocuous comment to remind the mink to beam out a backup. But she suspected Fidget would yield to temptation and call Floki and her brother near Mars instead.
“I know you miss your family,” she crooned. “You’ll tell your friends all about your adventures soon, when we’re back on the ship.” There, maybe Fidget would catch a hint.
She clambered to her feet as the servers returned with the lightened cart. But a steward paused to point back to the cabin. “You must return to your seat. The plane is ready for departure.”
Damn. She ran full-out up the companionway. Fidget lingered, so she jogged in place until the critter caught up, then returned to her seat.
“Refreshed?” Clay asked. “Wish I’d gotten a chance.”
The lunch spread waited under more silvery domes, secured for takeoff on table surfaces cleverly stowed out of the way until now. Sass wasn’t sure why they called this a plane, as it lacked wings and used vertical takeoff and landing. With no propellers either, she assumed it operated on gravity. She’d asked Melkor, but he seemed earnestly clueless on how the vehicle worked, more of a political animal.
As they gained altitude and left Alaska behind over the open Pacific, she didn’t bother to tell Clay what she’d learned. Fidget would take care of that. The stainless domes, one per person, supplied miso soup, salmon sushi, and pungent pickled vegetables of gold and purple which Melkor was unable to identify. Sass spotted strange-colored patches in the open ocean, one of a purplish cast and another brilliant turquoise. Their host shrugged when asked.
The social niceties of lunch complete, the captain settled back into her seat, eyes out the window on a storm that blew up. North. What lay north of Pontiac? Boreal forests. Eventually the Arctic Circle.
Oh! They’d sent her ship to Samara! Or Oslo, she supposed, but Clay’s patient questioning made clear that among the four League great powers, one stood head and shoulders above the others. Russia.
How would she retrieve her crew now?
30
Russia was a Northern League founder. The nation quelled, culled, and assimilated along a border that originally stretched 60,000 kilometers, and only grew longer as it pacified China, Southwest Asia, and Eastern Europe. They earned their preeminent role the hard way.
A miserable Darren contemplated the endless winter-dead fields and forests below. They’d passed below the Arctic Circle finally, but here it remained dark night. The landscape was illuminated by pulsating green sheets of the Northern Lights, gilding an endless expanse of dark trees and snow, occasionally muddied with tracks.
He flew Thrive within an open cage of jet fighters, six at up, down, front, rear, right and left. An extra four spread above to block his egress, free to pounce should he break formation. Which he might be sorely tempted to do, except they promised that he’d see the captain wherever they were going. Eli claimed the trajectory likely ended in Siberia. But this meant little more to the chief engineer than any other place on Earth. Sure, he probably learned about Siberia in school. But that was eighty years ago. And social studies wasn’t his favorite subject.
His aching butt had been in this seat for nine hours now. Mostly in the dark, because the sun set at the Arctic Circle a couple hours into his morning flight. The botanist spelled him briefly for bio breaks. Eli made clear he wouldn’t dare touch the dashboard controls, merely scream for help. But at least Darren could trust him to know when to scream.
The flying wasn’t too difficult. Before he took off, or even extricated himself from that damned hanger, he had a long talk with the squadron leader of these jets. This he could do now directly, as his evening’s efforts had borne fruit. Thrive’s comms could now call anyone on Earth, provided he knew their comm code.
At this point, his phone book included Ivett and Three-Eight, still aboard, plus one jet squadron leader, and a handful of children’s earpieces issued by Terrence at Killingfield College. But he’d never learned Sass’s number. He’d briefly considered systematic cold-calling. The universe of possible numbers was well into the quadrillions. The protocol specified that any caller caught robo-dialing would be burned out of the system. No, he couldn’t call people a
t random – or grain silos, or power plant regulator devices, children’s toys or toaster ovens. The universal comm identifiers accessed the internet of things, not just people.
Other than that, he could listen to the maritime news. Which made little sense even when half was in English. They’d soon left English behind.
But being able to speak to the lead pilot was useful. Kaol leaning on Three-Eight was inefficient when quick reaction time mattered. He’d stressed to the woman squadron leader, Lemur-3, that he was a poor pilot. He would merely tell the ship to pace the lead jet, and maintain a constant distance with that one, the one to the right, and the one directly below. Therefore, for the love of all things bright and beautiful, please aim for calm air. Because if the ship started getting knocked around by tricky winds, he had zero confidence in his ability to prevent a mid-air collision.
She understood. Or at least, she adjusted her formation’s spacing outward. Darren still felt they cuddled awfully tight. To an Earthling fighter jock, maybe 150 meters seemed generous. To a spacer, it felt downright claustrophobic. Sass could fly figure-eights through such a formation with a PO-3, and Ben! He could fly a shuttle through the cargo door on a diagonal, by eye, at speed, and halt before he hit the bulkhead.
But Darren was an engineer, dammit!
Lemur-3 wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Darren wasn’t sure which jet she piloted. But she’d done well with the wind stream of the polar vortex, giving him a heads-up five minutes before they hit the crossbeam blast at 350 kph, and splaying out her formation. And they did it again, exiting the vortex on the far side of the North Pole. She also reassured him that the Northern Lights were harmless, cosmic rays hitting the magnetosphere.
They sure didn’t look harmless to him. Giant undulating sheets of green, sometimes pink and purple, reached upward as high as the atmosphere. Thrive’s ESD field danced right along, spewing rainbow fire.
But the ship took no harm from that. The ‘jet stream’ was another splay point, and they veered around a couple massive storms. By now the poor engineer grew awfully tired. He sat still and anxious in the pilot seat, hand hovering to intervene if the auto-pilot should screw up, confident he’d screw up much worse.
At last they began to shed altitude. The Northern Lights died out, and he tuned the display to false lighting. This particular expanse of landscape looked no more appealing than any other. His hand trembled under the unrelenting strain. “Lemur-3, Thrive. Are we there yet?”
“Thrive, Lemur-3. Clearly not. Interrogative.”
Darren sighed. Lemur-3 had no sense of humor. More to the point, she probably didn’t speak very often, given a world with mind to mind comms. He wondered if Pontiac kids complained about speaking practice the way his kids griped about penmanship drills. Aw, Dad, nobody talks anymore!
He rephrased. “We’re losing altitude. Is this the approach to our destination?”
After a pause, Lemur-3 admitted, “Fifteen minutes out. Will call in ten.”
Before she called back, Darren saw a floodlit snow-free airport ahead, with more of those damned blue light lanes. “Lemur-3, reminder, Thrive does not know your traffic rules. Please land while I slow and approach from the periphery.”
“Negative, Thrive. You will follow a flare beacon. You will coordinate with Baikonur Control at –” She reeled off a long comms identifier with an extra few digits, and waited until he connected the comms call.
At which point, his jet escort peeled off to circle above in a holding pattern, watching for him to obey instructions.
These weren’t too difficult. Baikonur Control lit a flare on the hardtop, amongst a flock of other ships but with some elbow room. He simply bled off velocity until Thrive was directly above his mark, and slowly lowered. He halted at 50 meters and requested Baikonur douse the flare. He took a moment to vividly share what size crater would result if water seeped into his undercarriage. For that reason, he would hover 5 meters above the surface and no lower. And his ESD shield would remain on.
Baikonur Control wasn’t pleased to hear that, when a hastily-formed committee finally decoded his English. They weren’t accustomed to pilots failing to obey simple direct orders.
Tough.
At last, Darren settled into his parking slot, on an open windswept plain that suggested winter blew through here with great ferocity. That could make his life interesting. He gratefully stretched his neck and back and locked the controls. He called Baikonur Control again to request and receive local time. This proved 06:14, with sunrise expected in a couple hours.
He was used to time resets coming into a planet. But this was his first that utilized internal time zones. How irritatingly dysfunctional.
“Darren?” Eli hailed him. “Have you checked out our neighboring ships?”
“Ships?” Darren echoed. He panned a camera around. The vessels were easy to see, six well-lit columns standing around him like megaliths.
And suddenly he got it. Those were surface-to-space rockets. Rego hell!
His best defense on Earth was the bail-out button, Sass’s pre-laid takeoff-and-scram autopilot program to their rendezvous at a Lagrange point. Then they could kick back their heels and wait for Ben to come fetch. And from an orb the size of Earth, he could punch that escape program from nearly anywhere. No one would be in position to stop him. Sure, maybe a few rough minutes against the attack satellites, but his shields could take that, and he’d be past them.
Except he’d just voluntarily flown Thrive into a spaceport, flanked by no less than six ships at the ready who could stop him from reaching orbit. He checked the cameras above. Yup, half of Lemur’s squadron, or their Russian equivalents, also flew a holding pattern above.
Darren Markley was a smart man, among the most brilliant engineers on Mahina. And his heart quailed. His face burned with humiliation, as his breathing grew shallow. He’d flown Thrive straight into a trap.
“Eli, I’m an idiot.”
“Don’t sweat it,” the botanist assured him. “I didn’t see it coming, either. In fact, the locals might not even know how thoroughly they just boxed us.”
Darren considered the condensate wafting off a waiting guard rocket. “Oh, I think they have a fair idea.”
31
China decomposed along ethnic and language lines, with larger clumps breaking into desperate warfare over food and water rights. Japan instigated extra strife wherever peace broke out, to maintain a high roiling death rate.
Ben finished smoothing a plastic drop sheet on the hold floor. He looked up at earnest young Rover, about to let loose on his first foamcrete extrusion project. They were making pieces of pressure bulkhead to flank the new airlock for Mars One. The commandant figured the makee-learnee task was ideally suited to butter the lad up, introducing him to Merchant Thrive’s technology base while making a concrete contribution to the Mars One colony.
Remi normally supervised crew assigned to engineering tasks. But the commander wanted to pick his recruit’s brain on the odd Luna alliance offer. He just wanted to bond more first. Besides, the entire hold was chugging away at manufacturing tasks, and into the overflow loft deck above crew berthing. Overloaded, the chief was starting to snark at people and throw his arms around in overblown Sagamore gestures.
“Ready,” Ben encouraged Rover. He tapped a booted toe on the corner of the base sheet as a prompt, mouth slightly open in anticipation. Foamcrete extruders played a major role in life on Mahina, used for everything from furniture to housing. Swap out the opaque foam with its flexiglass mix, and the gizmo built windows too.
“I just place it?” Rover knelt and positioned the robo-wheeled unit where Ben indicated and looked up for reassurance. The commandant tamped out a smile and shook his head slightly.
The kid looked down again, frowning in concentration. He rotated the device, which he’d set down backward, and checked his boss’s face to confirm. At Ben’s grin, he activated the unit. Which spewed foamcrete from knee to shoulder before he managed to turn
it off.
Remi, passing nearby, yanked the remote control unit out of the kid’s hand and turned it off. He bopped him on the head, pulled him to his feet, and wiped the thick foamcrete off his leg before it set into a walking cast. “Clean that up.”
“Can’t make mistakes, can’t make nothing, chief,” Ben quipped cheerfully.
“Can make mistakes and still make nothing,” Remi countered. He flipped over the extruder like a turtle, and showed Rover where he’d set the flow rate too high for the aperture, causing the foam to spit out around the edges. Then he and Ben quickly used the drop sheet to dump the spewed foam back into the source vat, and laid it flat to start over.
“Ben!” Judge called from the catwalk. “Darren on the ansible.”
The commandant gave him a thumb’s-up and shot Rover a quick smile. “The downside of working with the captain. Interruptions.”
“Go,” Remi encouraged.
Ben bounded to the catwalk, jogged to his office, then hung on the doorframe a moment. He’d been working all day on engineering and new hire training, to distract himself from the Earth business. He blew out, nodded, and prepared to exude calm. Whatever Darren was up against, the best Ben could offer was confidence.
He slipped into his desk seat and beamed at the man. The normally cheerful engineer looked hag ridden. “Sight for sore eyes, chief! What’s your status?”
“I–” Darren gulped. Rich in self-flagellation, he began reeling off his self-capture into Baikonur spaceport.
Ben looked that up on his desk’s computer surface top. Damn, in continuous use for well over two centuries. “Chief, take a deep breath. This is not surprising. And you’re OK, right? Crew status?”
“Everyone’s fine. We’ve got two Earthlings still aboard.” His face and posture still cringed, as though expecting a tongue-lashing for his failures. “The ESD shields have held throughout captivity. I’m not setting down, to protect the fuel.”
