Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  “Be my guest,” Wilder invited, voice dripping with sarcasm. We had the option of recharging halfway all this time? And you didn’t tell me?

  Zan caught the vibe. He defended, “They hadn’t reached this point yet. We don’t have power cables on every tree, you know.”

  Wilder slowed his progress flying low up the roadway. Zan assiduously burned road through the torrential rain, while he checked in with his crew.

  Yes, they were willing and able to host the shuttle to recharge there instead of backtracking all the way to Neptune’s wharf. Wilder wasn’t wildly enthused by his narrow margin for error, only 5%, and they’d have to burn themselves a parking spot. But at least Zan’s buddies would set up beacons and sonics for their arrival.

  Soon Wilder reached the spot, with only 3% power left. He directed Zan to burn out their preferred parking spot first. They landed while it still wafted curtains of steam. Zan shot the rest of the trees after they were down.

  Wilder sat back and stretched to unkink his stressed neck muscles. “Any chance they can drop by and charge the battery for us?”

  “No!” Zan spat in disgust.

  He didn’t care for Wilder’s pretend laziness. The sergeant kept it up for sport, but the hunter wouldn’t back down. Zan honestly disliked the suggestion that failing to pull one’s own weight was amusing. Wilder sadly realized that he needed to break the habit before Zan found him contemptible.

  “Right. Let’s suit up.”

  Captain and engineer were strident on this point – no bakkra in the shuttle. And the little vehicle could hardly offer a full bio-lock. Copeland’s compromise was to add a flash-freeze feature to the airlock. Anyone who left the shuttle needed to wear a full pressure suit to keep the bakkra on the outside instead of burrowing into the wearer. Then the airlock froze the outside to death when they returned, leaving the people inside the suits bakkra-free.

  Like the Thrive, and Earth life in general, pressure suits were definitely not designed for Denali temperatures. Wilder guzzled his first liter of water while he topped up their p-suit tanks to work outside. “Why does this particular bit of forest have a charging station?”

  “Used to be a town, 20 miles up the hollow,” Zan replied. “I was born here, actually. Dominated by hunters. Waterfalls was dominated by cosmos. But bakkra contaminated the grow domes, and they decided to abandon.”

  “How was this town different from Waterfalls?”

  “I was too young to remember much,” Zan allowed. “But it specialized in resources. Neptune couldn’t have been built without Glasswork. Had a sky drive, as well as hydro power from the river. The roadside batteries were dead when the road team got here. Had to charge off the power line from the river turbines.”

  They shuffled out the airlock in their pressure suits, and hauled the spare battery onto the grav-lifter yet again. By the time Zan finished torching the trees, Wilder didn’t have enough charge left to fly to the recharging spot. But they were a practiced team at this by now.

  Though not in these environs. Unlike Thrive, the shuttle wasn’t equipped to level ground, merely to burn trees. And like Waterfalls, the abandoned community of Glasswork straddled the slopes of a mountain river ravine. Working by green chem-lights and their helmet lights, they had to slow every 10 meters or so to coax the grav-lifter around obstacles or up steep scrambles.

  “What is this stuff?” Wilder asked. “On the ground.” He’d noticed them around Thrive’s spaceport clearing as well, hardened black puddles.

  Zan looked surprised that he didn’t know this yet. “Resources from the burned tree. Silica mostly, glass. That’s what we mine. This valley is richer than Waterfalls.”

  Wilder blinked. “Mine?”

  Zan kicked a glass puddle. “Animals too. This looks like a crab. They’re high in iron. As you go up the food chain, the minerals get more concentrated.”

  Check. “Does Copeland know about this?”

  “Why would I care what Copeland knows?” During Zan’s in-dwelling on the Thrive, Aurora was the one to haunt Copeland, along with Ben and Eli and Clay, seeming to hang on their every word and gesture. Zan ghosted Wilder, Cortez, and the captain, the warriors from Mahina. Engineering wasn’t his gig at all.

  Wilder conceded the point. “You said they had a star drive. Where did they get fuel for it?”

  “I assume they made it,” Zan allowed. “Excellent resource trees. We still send expeditions down here for metals, phosphorus, other things. Waterfalls doesn’t have nearly the minerals. But we recycle, and it’s underpopulated. So usually we don’t care.”

  “I’ll be damned. The hunters do the mining.”

  “Of course. The other classes don’t leave the domes.”

  “Who would know about making sky drive fuel? When Glasswork was still alive. Do the elders from Glasswork live in Waterfalls now?”

  Zan sighed. “Many of them died getting us out of here. Might be a few. I’ll ask around.”

  Later, when they were back in the shuttle and snug for the ‘night’ hours, Copeland was delighted to hear from the sergeant. Zan did find a couple names for him, of disabled elders of Glasswork.

  Copeland ordered Wilder not to contact the captain. He sketched what Sass and Clay learned from Dr. Yang. “They’re kind of reeling. But they’re still Sass and Clay,” he reminded the sergeant. “Be nice.”

  “Yeah. Damn.”

  “Can you make it to Waterfalls from there?” Cope asked. “Or is there another charging pit stop along the way?”

  “No forest burning needed from here. We’re good. I’m just beat. You want samples of this glass stuff?”

  “Sure. Thanks. High in iron would be good. You can stow it in the cabin if you want. Anything that turned silica to glass was hot enough to sterilize the bakkra on the inside. The airlock will kill it on the outside. Good work, Wilder.”

  Wilder’s p-suit helmet hit the truck’s ceiling yet again as they jounced over something – tree root, rock, or predator he couldn’t tell. He kept his eyes on his assigned job, firing the aft port gun, aimed through narrow slits in the armor. There wasn’t room in this tank for a passenger.

  Occasionally one of his companions emitted a brief comment. But for the most part the hunters worked silently, and their utterances were in their own dialect unless addressing him directly. Zan stayed behind to mind the shuttle – Ben’s orders. One of them had to stay behind and guard the vehicle, while the other traipsed into the forest in search of an abandoned kiln to make star drive fuel.

  Ben assumed Wilder would stay with the shuttle, of course. What Ben didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. The sergeant commanded this mission.

  A squeaky snarl like a cranky kitten reached him over his suit audio. Unlike the rest of this crew, his pickups weren’t adjusted to down-pitch the incoming sound. So the beast caught him totally by surprise, less than a split second between nothing-there and a metric ton of purple-and-grey muscle writhing on his flaming gun muzzle.

  Naturally, he stopped firing when it was dead, his heart pounding. But the gunner next to him shoved him aside and demonstrated the next step – get the damned thing off the gun. A third gunner grabbed Wilder by the suit and pulled him backward, then thrust him to mind the starboard aft gun while his tutor finished the job.

  “I’m sorry,” he attempted.

  “Why? Stay on that gun.” The subject was closed.

  Further utterances were in hunter insider code. Wilder recognized the style, if not the content. Soldiers everywhere had their own terse jargon.

  Further down the road, there were a bad few minutes when a ‘saber snout’ died on the roof. That was trickier to dislodge, and Wilder caught his fair share of the blood and innards in the process. All four gunners had to squeeze out through a moon roof and manhandle the thing. In the interim, they had a dead feast drawing the attention of every predator in the neighborhood. And nothing to protect them except for the truck sonics. These looked like yellow tennis balls sticking out on antennas –
not an image that inspired confidence.

  Finally the tank trundled to a stop, and they dismounted with their mobile guns. Wilder looked around while his hosts debated divvying up the labor in unintelligible terms and gestures. It took him a moment, but he spotted why they’d stopped here. Thick glass blocks tumbled from broken girders.

  They’d reached an abandoned dome.

  15

  Sass tried not to think as she pulled on her wetsuit. Her hopes that she and Clay would wake up this morning with fresh perspective and a laugh had not borne fruit. Her emotional state reminded her of her first day back to work after her son’s funeral. Not suicidal, exactly, but the assignment sergeant took one look and informed her that she would not be issued a weapon that week. He was right.

  And Clay wasn’t talking. In itself, this wasn’t unusual. Her lover kept his own counsel. But she didn’t care for the hard lines around his eyes. She wouldn’t issue him a weapon, either.

  But who needed a weapon with 35 meters of ocean above them? They did, apparently. Upon learning this wasn’t Clay’s first scuba experience, the dive master scurried off for harpoons.

  Her comm buzzed, and she glowered at it.

  “You’re still captain,” Clay squealed softly, fidgeting with his gear belt.

  She grudgingly opened the comm. “What do you need, Kassidy?”

  “Where are you?” the young woman demanded shrilly. “Dad wants to give us the grand tour.”

  “Clay and I are stepping outside this morning,” Sass shared. “In the mood for extreme sports.” The more suicidal the better, she thought, gauging Clay’s dead expression.

  “Outstanding! I’ll ditch Aurora. Where do I meet you?”

  “No,” Sass said flatly. “Clay and I need time.”

  “Sass… That crap my dad foisted on you yesterday, calling you a cyborg –”

  Sass disconnected the comm. But it showed a blinking message from Ben, asking her to call. Dammit. “Ben. What do you need?”

  “Wow, you sound funny!” Sass growled at him, so he skipped to the point. “Wilder went native. He asked to visit this ghost town in the jungle. Wants to investigate an abandoned kiln. It used to make sky drive fuel. Cope thought it sounded interesting. So I gave Wilder the OK, but he had to guard the shuttle. Instead he let Zan stay with the shuttle and took off into the forest –”

  Sass cut him off. “Is the shuttle alright?”

  “Uh, yes. Wilder too, so far as I know. I just hoped you’d reel him in.”

  “No. You have my authority to issue orders. He has authority to do what he needs to do. So compromise.”

  “But –”

  “Gotta go.” Click.

  “I thought you left Copeland in charge,” Clay murmured.

  “They’re a team,” Sass replied without caring. “Probably taking turns.” She picked up her dive belt and studied the tools she’d have at hand. She’d never been scuba diving in her life. Clay implied that she had, so as not to get coddled by the dive master. She frowned faintly at the saw-toothed knife. “Tell me about scuba diving.”

  “It’s a p-suit, Sass. There’s a helmet. You swim, or you walk. The fins seem geared to walking.”

  Unlike snorkeling fins, their funky footwear added only 5 cm of webbing beyond their toes. Sass pulled them on and practiced shuffling across the wet tiled floor. This wasn’t a fun spa room, decorated in turquoise. The walls were full of black and metal gear racks, with rubberized mesh benches for dressing. To one side, water slurped in a hole a few meters across, with ladder. She understood the physics, that the air pressure within equaled the ocean pressure without. She still felt that pool ought to squirt out of its banks or show waves or something. But the slurp volume was due to the hard-surface acoustics surrounding it. She came to a stop staring down into the black surface.

  She squatted down and reached a bare hand toward the surface.

  “Don’t!” squeaked Dove, the dive master, returning with his spears. “Turn on the lights first.” He flicked on the outdoor floods below.

  The cylindrical water chimney down and out of the habitat was indeed full of creatures. Sass spied many eel-like fish, and things that reminded her of swimming sea urchins with wing-like barbed fins, and others with exoskeletons reminiscent of shrimp and lobster. Unlike the land life, the deep creatures invested no metabolic effort into coloring. They favored a yellowish or grey dun, as had yesterday’s monster manatee.

  Nothing reacted to the light. Unlike the manatee, the small-fry were blind.

  “This one’s your sonic nuisance,” Dove explained, pointing to a tool on her belt. He extracted his own and reached it down to zap the water. Fishes fled. “Clay, you paying attention? We also advertise we aren’t good to eat with black gunk. We coat ourselves with it.” He pointed to a smeared cake-sized can with lid, sitting beneath the pre-dive checklist on a small counter.

  “What is it?” Clay asked dully.

  “Raw petroleum. Stinks like hell. We do that after our helmets are on. But we can’t coat the helmet itself, or we can’t see. Protecting your head with your arms, that’s a good instinct. But don’t smudge your helmet.”

  “Got it,” Sass agreed, feeling queasy.

  Dove continued with a long litany of instructions. Clay cut him off before he could expound too long on the virtues of their guylines. They got the point. Getting lost out there in the pitch darkness was a death sentence. For most people, anyway. The Thrive couple weren’t in the mood to confide that they were immortal robots only masquerading as boy and girl.

  Sass swallowed the thought. Clay merely told the teacher they were experienced with lifelines in space. Ordinarily she would overcompensate for Clay’s cool manner by burbling. She had no friendly banter on tap today. “We don’t anticipate difficulty, Dove.”

  Discomfited by the lack of any social bonding, Dove sighed and finished gearing them up and checking them out. “It takes two. Always. No one dives from Neptune alone, no matter what.”

  “Of course,” Sass agreed. She sealed her glass ball of a helmet. Smearing black goop all over Dove was almost fun, though he handled his own privates. Clay smeared her, while Dove coated Clay in firm quick strokes to demonstrate the desired thickness.

  “The checkout list is organized by two’s as well.” Dove doggedly reviewed the list with them. About the only things they carried one of were their helmets and themselves.

  “Usually with a party, we each carry a different weapon. Gives us options. Obviously, we’ve already tested the comms on each other. Chomp your control bit to talk to Neptune Control like this.” He demonstrated with action and words. “Neptune Control, Dove leading out party of three.” He chomped back. “No one speaks for another. You need to say, ‘Neptune Control, Clay out with Dove’s party.’ Same for Sass.”

  They complied. And finally it was time to join the fishies.

  Despite Clay’s assurances, this didn’t strike Sass as terribly much like a space walk. In space, the adversary was a whole lot of nothing. In this ocean was a very great deal of something to resist her every move, plus intelligent beasties eager to bite.

  And muck. The biological detritus of a deep water column was no different on Denali than on the Hudson and lakes of her childhood. Mercifully, since there was no light down here even in midsummer, there were no grasping weeds. She certainly didn’t wear magnetic boots to hold her onto a hull, though.

  After they each clamped one of their two lifelines, Dove jumped in, flippers first, holding his air regulator. Clay hovered a hand over Sass’s back to warn that he’d push her if she dithered. He was only teasing.

  Maybe. They were both in a black mood today. She leaned over the pool to check that Dove had cleared the seabed below.

  Clay shoved her in, then jumped right beside her.

  Sass was too busy flailing in half-panic to swear at him. But her reflexes took hold. She panted short breaths, in for one and out for three, to keep from hyperventilating. She made two fists and pressed them to
gether. Using her abs, she pulled her feet beneath her. And she drifted to stand on the slippery mud.

  Dove remonstrated, “Clay, that’s two strikes. First, one person at a time. Two, you don’t decide for anyone else when to jump. One more strike, and you go back in. I’ll blacklist you. You’ll be barred from diving here, permanently. You so much as cross the dive hall threshold, and alarms go off all over the city. Security comes at a run, ready to shoot. Am I understood?”

  “I’m fine,” Sass attempted.

  “Irrelevant.” Squeaky with helium, Sass knew it was a real challenge to speak with authority instead of sounding foolish. Dove managed it. Sass appreciated his technique.

  “I’ll behave,” Clay bit out.

  “Yes, you will,” Dove vowed. “Between here and the edge of the lights. That’s at those struts, Clay, and not one step beyond. Move, practice, get comfortable, 10 minutes.”

  Giving Clay a wide berth, Sass trudged to one of those struts on the periphery of the 50-meter pool of flood lights. Once there, she experimented with her flashlight and helmet light. They sure didn’t cut far into the murk. Yes, that lifeline was the only hope.

  “Dove?” she asked. “Yesterday, we saw an enormous creature, big as my spaceship. If one of those shows up, what do we do about it?”

  “There’s a cage around the bottom of the habitat,” Dove replied. “To protect the pylons from anything big. The little guys nibble holes in it. Can’t keep them out. But you shouldn’t run into anything bigger than you here. That’s next lesson.”

  Right. Sass craned her neck to study the slimed bottom of the habitat above her. Then she carefully stowed her flashlight, and tried to swim back toward the up-chimney. But she sank. With enough effort, she could remain swimming above the sea floor, but it wasn’t worth it. Swimming could get her past a fissure if it wasn’t too wide. But where possible, she’d rather walk.

  Or pull myself? She tried tugging along her guyline. No. She could follow her tether, but with her arms occupied, she couldn’t stay above the sea floor with kicking alone. She noted that she and Clay hadn’t fouled each other’s ropes. But that came naturally to them. After months of playing the zero-g EVA game in the hold, and working outside the Thrive in earnest, she was more concerned about fouling her line with Dove’s than with Clay’s.