by Ginger Booth
“Debris!” he realized with a start. His fingers flew to start adding that missing threat to his board, with a sigh. No, Sass’s chief engineer wasn’t aware of all he was up against. On the bright side, unlike the satellites, his forward guns could be brought to bear. After a split-second of reflection, he realized he didn’t have to aim at those, merely destroy everything rolling into his path. His brain boggled momentarily on the geometry of that problem, then he realized it didn’t greatly matter, so long as he –
His eyes flicked up to the display. The fractal gateway was in his way.
“Teke, Ben. What happens if I fire the main gun at the gateway, diffuse cone?”
“Don’t.”
“But I need to,” he crooned.
“Just don’t do it!” the physicist replied over comms. “Ben, I’m not guessing! You’d obliterate the home planet! And us.”
“Oh.” When he put it that way… Ben still had a debris problem, however. And the gateway lay in between. Well, adjust the geometry then. He swerved cautiously with the side thrusters, trusting the auto-program on the guns to adjust and continue firing on the problem satellites.
“Thrive hit again,” Zan noted.
Remi also chimed in, “Cap, sideways veer is counter-indicated at this acceleration. You’re red-lining the inertial dampener. Please obey that warning light.”
Ben ignored them both as he ever-so-carefully nudged Merchant away from Thrive One, toward the incoming spin of flotsam, until his main gun could clear the pretty fractal pattern, just barely. This he did by eye and hand, unable to afford the time to express the need in algorithmic form for the auto-pilot and auto-gun. A younger captain might let the AI give it a whirl, but this captain’s skills predated an AI smart enough for that. When the pressure was on, he trusted himself before the computer.
There. He fired a diffuse cone with the main asteroid-slicer gun, to anti-spinward, the direction centuries of accumulated junk rolled in from. And likely a fair collection of current satellites in good working order – couldn’t be helped. Hopefully not any manned orbital platforms, but beyond a thousand klicks, the gun shouldn’t trouble anything with an ESD shield up. Stars twinkled like fairy lights before him, their lives measured in microseconds, as bits of metal lost cohesion in bright explosions.
Damn, he loved space! The never-ending novelty and heart-rending cold beauty of the music of the spheres.
“Rockets doing something,” Zan prompted.
Yes, the bridge really required more than one person to pay attention to all the simultaneous goings-on today. Ben reoriented his cameras thataway, and frowned. One rocket appeared to have broken in two already, its tail end falling away to Earth in a flaming arc. Then an explosion rocked the second, then third rockets, as they did the same.
“I didn’t shoot them. Did you do that?”
“I didn’t shoot them,” Zan hastened to deny. “I’m not shooting anything. Can I shoot something?”
“Mm…no.” Ben rapidly considered, and discarded, the idea of explaining to Zan how to monitor and fire the main gun on debris. Instead he set a timer to remind himself to fire again in 12 seconds. And he damned the distraction, because he still hadn’t figured out why those rockets committed suicide.
Rockets. Oh. They weren’t committing suicide. They’d jettisoned the stage that got them this far up Earth’s atmosphere. If they were in Earth’s atmosphere anymore – proximity, anyway. Aside from the gas giant Pono’s gloriously extensive rings, Ben wasn’t accustomed to a planet having outer layers like the papery wrapper of an onion. Pono’s rings were a hell of a lot easier to exit.
Yeah, that first ex-rocket was decreasing range. His timer pinged. He quickly rotated his view, lined up his shot, and fired again. This time he didn’t dawdle to admire the fireflies. He immediately panned his cameras back to the liberated payloads of those three columns of fire.
“Ben, you damaged the gateway!” Teke warned.
“Teke, figure out whether it’s traversable. Now!” Ben barked back. “I need that answer!”
Because right about now was when he’d intended to grab Thrive One and shove it through. At least, that’s how he mentally called what he did, when he focused the gate onto another ship and engaged it to translate. In this case, the dimension on which ship A influenced ship B was not one of the four pedestrian dimensions, nor was the force applied ever demonstrated in a high school classroom. But Ben had a four-dimensional mind. ‘Grab and shove’ worked for him.
Could he bring the main gun to bear on that…Problem One, he decided to mentally dub the space ship, or whatever it was, growing closer. No. P1 lay below Merchant’s waist. But was that true of Thrive One? At the moment, Darren wasn’t doing a damned thing to advance his own survival. Or rather, he was probably going mental over pressing internal concerns.
“Darren, Ben. Can you get your main gun to bear on the first of those spaceships?”
“The what?”
Ben viciously stabbed the threat board, highlighting the three…hostiles…in orange. He labeled them P1, P2, P3, then zipped the updated threat board to the acting captain. “Can you shoot P1?”
“Ben, life support –!”
“Darren, that doesn’t matter. Not now. Can you – shoot – P1?”
“I –”
Ben imagined how the frazzled engineer gazed in panic across the vastly complex dashboard ahead of him, trying to evolve answer or method. “Target lock main gun reticle onto P1. If you can’t shoot it, the system won’t lock. I need that answer, Darren.”
Put in those terms, the acting captain followed instructions. “No. It won’t lock.”
“Ben out.” That was too bad. In that case, he needed to redirect the chase gun. Or, better, just get the hell out of here.
“Teke? Can I transit?!”
“Still thinking.”
“Think faster, dammit!”
But Ben’s fingers already pursued their own life again, inputting a macro for shoot-a-P, resume-shooting-satellites, to minimize time distracted from the satellite problem. He didn’t know for a fact that P1 and its friends were a greater threat than the attack drones. But he doubted they’d be here unless they were very potent indeed. Looked expensive.
He jabbed the execute button to test his work, targeting P1. The chase laser fired. An attack satellite fired at Thrive One, causing another container to shatter. Then the chase laser resumed killing satellites. How many of those rego things were there in orbit? A lot. He didn’t seem to be making much dent in the supply.
Of more urgent concern, his chase laser made no lasting impression on P1. The mover was still closing. P2 and P3 were hot on its heels, but spread so as not to present any two-birds-with-one-stone opportunities. At this rate, P1 would soon enter the gateway envelope with Merchant and Thrive.
The gateway. Ben flicked his camera view back to the fractal flower across the stars, and thought fast.
45
The Colony Corps kept an eleventh world for themselves, Sanctuary.
Ben momentarily leaned on his dashboard to peer into the curling fractal light show, so weird and complex, yet so intimate. He’d asked Teke to figure out whether it was safe to use, without recasting it from scratch. He’d been trying to avoid the inordinate fuel cost.
But Teke was a theorist. His was the mind that reached into the idealized realms of mathematics and pulled forth a possibility, pristine and fragile. Ben’s husband Cope was the engineer who bridged the gap between that ethereal purity in seven dimensions, and their own universe, warts and all, with a power assist from Elise, goddess of metallurgy and precision manufacturing. Ben considered Cope’s contribution the greatest, but he was biased.
He pursed his lips as a flicker of anger returned. Sass barely tossed his husband an also-ran on her maudlin bye-bye. Then she had the gall to call Darren and Remi the best space engineers she’d ever known. Granted, Cope did tend to freeze in terror at space’s hairier moments. Like this one. He preferred raising child
ren and methodical progress building novel devices. But Cope would have loved Sass calling him a son to her. A rego hell of a lot more than Ben did.
He shook off his irritation. Four inventors were honored in the name of the BECT gateway, not three. Ben was the test pilot. He took the ethereal and the concrete as a black box. And he put the pedal to the metal and tried the damned thing. He survived its shortcomings to fine-adjust, then tried and tried again.
And he saw it. One of the graceful arms of that fractal was bent, not curved. Its fine feathered substructure beyond the break looked threadbare, as though every Nth filament were plucked out. And yeah, Teke was the wrong person for that.
He had grave doubts about that damaged gate. But he had a test subject at hand.
“Teke, snapshot complete readings of P1. Before and after.” Rather than explain, he sent a context image of his new pal ‘P1.’
“Before and after what?”
But Ben was already locking onto it, or lensing as the physicist would call it. “Testing the gate.”
“I’m still trying to –”
Teke stopped speaking because P1 was gone. Ben hurled it into the gateway, figuratively speaking.
And here’s the trick he didn’t often share. The last thing he wanted was for his skeleton crews on Stalwart and Psyche to deal with this unknown menace, let alone thousands of civilians on Mars One. And he absolutely did not choose to make a habit of this – he preferred to translate all other ships through first, and then himself. Because he liked control. But his BECT lens actually operated through the gateway, to transfer a ship toward him as well as away from him. Because due to universal symmetries, it couldn’t not, as Teke unhelpfully un-clarified. The physicist was a pain in the tuchus.
Ben reached through the gateway, conceptually, and drew P1 back.
He laughed out loud and tapped his own dashboard to snapshot the view. Voila, his question was answered! He wasn’t putting his ass through that gate. P1, previously shaped sort of like a bullet, now looked like a beer can after he’d stomped on it. Not what he expected! With no propulsion left, and velocity pointing in the wrong direction, P1 rapidly decayed into an arc to rejoin the mother planet.
It would cross many lanes of traffic on the way down, not at all on the preferred orbital tracks of this many-tiered 3D highway. Maybe it would collide with something, maybe not. P1 was no longer Ben’s problem.
He gleefully plucked up P2, also now in range, and flipped it into the can-crusher. And pulled it back. This one came out stretched like taffy, or by a wire-drawing machine. It bent into a ‘C’ as it began its final descent.
P3 got the hell away from him. Good choice.
That resolved, Ben killed the broken warp gateway, which now warped metal in the wrong dimensions. The whorls of the pattern vanished instantly, but he followed his instruments instead, where some echoes reverberated longer. When he deemed it sufficiently gone, he swung the main gun in the direction he wanted to all along, and blasted a cone through it to clear debris threats on the path out. He waited another second, and blasted again. Then he realized the only reason the gateway lay in that inconvenient direction was because the pilot cast it there.
That would be him. “Remi, I need to cast a replacement gateway. I broke the last one.”
“I noticed. Nice! Refueling complete. Started on arrival.”
“I knew there was a reason I loved you.”
The commandant settled to his calculations. Zan interrupted him to blast another cone. He handled that one shot, then explained to his gunner that the aim was invariant, he just needed to fire it occasionally from now on.
And with that, all threats were covered while he completed and double-checked his numbers. He made Teke check them too, because he had the breathing room.
The physicist snorted amusement at a revision that essentially rotated the gateway 90 degrees, centered on Ben. “Yes, your math is correct.”
Then Ben cast a fresh new gateway, off to starboard instead of directly ahead. “Darren, ready for gateway exit in 56, 55, 54.” Mahinans never completed a countdown.
That would be stressful.
“Never been so rego ready for anything in my life,” Darren assured him.
Ben chuckled. “So tell me. How’s your ship holding up?”
“I – aye-aye. I’m the only one left uninjured. Maybe a concussion.”
“Soon as I’m through, I’ll latch on. Just hang on another few minutes.”
And he grabbed Thrive One and shoved it through the newly formed perfect gateway. He gave Thrive five seconds clearance to get out of his way. Then Ben put himself through, and left Earth behind.
Along with Sass, Clay, and his grand-mink Enka. Damn you, Sass!
But his anger was short-lived, as the euphoria of having survived yet again kicked in. He cracked up laughing. Beside him, Zan smirked and shook his head. Rosy cheeks and laugh lines betrayed his shared enjoyment.
“That was fun! Let’s do it again!” Ben cried. At that, Zan gave in and chuckled too.
Ben strode across the married cargo ramps between his ship and Sass’s, with his relief team. Both ships – indeed every PO-3 ever built – had a cargo door in the same spot, starboard, just aft of the center-of-mass trapdoor. This meant they all paused at the mid-point and used their grav generators to flip upside-down, because that’s how the ships needed to marry.
They used Ben’s umbilical, see-through. Others found this off-putting, but he adored the stroll between the view-filling bulk of Mars and the stars, shaded from the powerful sun by the matching, mutually upside-down, sides of the ships. Slightly askew, he trod along the limb of the planet.
They all wore pressure suits in vacuum, since Thrive couldn’t hold pressure in the hold at this point. So he merely rapped his knuckles on the window for politeness’ sake, then strolled right in.
Darren engulfed him in an immediate hug. Porter, the agronomist, tried for a handshake, but ended up leaning on him. Ben passed that one to his doctor Sanjay, then reconsidered.
“Oh, Porter! I hear you got soil samples and crop seeds on Earth? Where are those?”
The agronomist, bleeding from the forehead with a cracked helmet, pointed to the trapdoor, then the staircase. “I’ve got to get them out, save them! The soil will die!” He staggered toward the staircase, two steps forward, one step left.
Sanjay reeled him back. Liam tapped on his side of the med-bay window, looking aggravated.
“Airlock,” Remi decreed. Darren’s crew had one standing there.
Ben took the other side as they carried it into position. “Wilder? Why don’t you secure that soil sample box for me. I’m sure Porter will get a lovely isolation lab in Mahina Actual to play with it. Won’t that be fun?”
“But it’s alive! They’re living things! They need to breathe! This vacuum will kill them!”
Sanjay patted the man and rotated him to look away from where Wilder made off with his hard-earned prize, perfectly safe in a pressurized container for now. “Are you injured, crewman? Aside from the bad bump on your head.”
Ben and Remi didn’t need to discuss it. Remi took high, Ben took low, and they sealed the emergency med-bay airlock into place. A permanent installation just got in the way most of the time. But it was designed to slap in and seal quickly, even by the least experienced crew, and the pair were hardly that.
Darren drifted along with them. “That was amazing, Ben. Thank you. You pilots are crazy!”
Ben shot him a glower. Remi explained, “He’s sensitive about being a useful madman.”
The commandant shifted his glower upward to his own chief engineer. “Useful. Glad I’m useful.” Remi reached down to try the test button and Ben slapped his hand away. He applied a screwdriver to his last screw. “Would it kill you people to show me some respect?” He reached up and hit the test button himself.
Remi caught his raised hand to swing him up to his feet. “We like you. We follow you. Take what you can get.”
&
nbsp; “Fine.” Ben gazed around the wreckage of the hold. Color me astonished, the ventilation ducts are skewered. That forward compartment off the hold, with its giant fans, was a misery to repair. Yet if a PO-3 was holed, chances were a fan rebuild was in someone’s future. But not his.
Zan peered out a gaping hole in the bulkhead, uncharacteristically at a convenient viewing height, possibly admiring Merchant from not very far. Usually that kind of hole was diabolically located in some corner of the top hull.
“Right,” Ben concluded his brief survey. “Most injured, crew cabin, port or starboard?” On his personal grav, he launched up to the mid-stair platform, swung his legs over the railing, swung them the other way just for fun, then bounded up the second flight to a perfect landing on the catwalk. He didn’t need to. But adrenaline left him feeling punchy.
Remi bounced up the more direct route, launching straight to the catwalk and banging into the bulkhead at the top. Ben had more gymnastic training, courtesy of an old crewmate on Thrive years ago. An extra couple decades had not made this ship any younger, and it had some serious wear today. He spun to drink it in, his training ship, where he’d lived and served for years, most recently as third officer under Sass.
It wasn’t a goner, not like his beloved Prosper, which never flew space again after he limped it home from Cantons. Throughout their ordeal, Thrive’s engine kept pushing like clockwork, and Darren’s auto-pilot never wavered. She’d do. Ben ran a loving hand across the crew bulkhead in benediction, grateful his first command survived to fly again.
“Port,” Darren replied, trudging up the stairs. “Shall I help carry, or go get Corky?”
“We got this,” Ben assured him, as he and Remi crowded together against the crew door for minimum vacuum volume. Remi did the honors casting a pink emergency bubble to seal them against the door. Ben knocked and opened the still-pressurized cabin.
A suited Zelda stood and swayed, holding onto an upper bunk for support. “Sar! Kaol is highest priori –” And she fainted, having stood up too fast. Ben was closest, and caught her before she could fall. He eased her back into the lower bunk for the moment.
