Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  After the 10 minutes of basic movement practice, Dove led them out into the darkness. The helmets weren’t lit within, only a little backwash from their headlight beams, looking otherworldly floating alongside her in the deep murk.

  At first the increasing density of creatures spooked her. But just as Dove promised, the denizens did not like crude oil. They crowded her helmet more, oblivious to its headlamp. But a simple swipe of her arm offended their noses, or taste buds, or gills or whatever senses drew them toward their prey. The shrimp and the bat-urchins, as she mentally dubbed them, seemed to be bottom-feeders. She knocked some of them up from the ground with every step.

  She paused to watch an eel kill and eat a bat-urchin. First it paralyzed its prey, then ate it whole. Well, at least eels don’t want to eat me, she consoled herself. Until she realized she’d simply require a bigger eel. She wouldn’t put it past a Denali ecosystem to supply a huge honking eel.

  Speaking of natural ecosystems, the skirting beneath Neptune dome didn’t qualify.

  Dove said, “Here’s the gate. You’ve done well so far. Go back, or enter the wild?”

  “Wild,” Clay responded immediately.

  Sass considered going back. But she hadn’t called herself a robot since she hit the water. Picturing herself back indoors, she expected she’d pull that unhappy mess back on. She’d have messages from the Thrive seeking her call, her guidance. And –

  “Wild,” she agreed, turning her face resolutely to the deep. “Is this when we learn to kill?”

  Dove chuckled. “My kind of girl!” Dove didn’t wear the red and gold bakkra of the land, but he was a hunter born and bred.

  16

  The gunner who’d earlier shoved Wilder out of the way seized his arm. “Kaz.”

  Wilder replied, “Pardon, I don’t understand.”

  “You’re Wilder. I’m Kaz. Follow me.”

  Without further ado, Kaz turned and slunk into the overgrown dome wreckage, hopping nimbly through the fallen glass.

  Wilder hastily turned on his faceplate cameras – Kassidy’s video camera dots – and struggled to keep up. Mortified, he had to ask Kaz to slow down, because he couldn’t watch his own step and figure out where Kaz was putting his feet at the same time.

  Without apology, Kaz complied, first slowing down to an exaggerated slow pace, acting out where he was stepping, and where not. As the sergeant demonstrated mastery of each basic lesson, he automatically sped to the next one, until Wilder was following not at the original pace, but not slowly either.

  Once he got his walking technique straightened out, he could take in more of his surroundings. The dome nearly broke his heart. On Mahina, he’d grown up with the stories of the meteor strike at Bonhomie that orphaned his lover Cortez, or the atmo drop over Schuyler that took Copeland’s parents, and many more. But here he saw the native vegetation reclaiming a children’s creche here, a cafeteria there, 15-meter ferns growing through bunks in what must have been a barracks once. And not so long ago, either. Zan was only in his twenties.

  One of the other scouts, long since slunk ahead into the darkness, returned to them. “Cliff ahead through the corridor.”

  Kaz and Wilder followed him to an abrupt drop-off. This didn’t make sense, unless an earthquake or something broke the dome. Or something. Wilder squatted down and stuck a screwdriver into the forest dirt at the edge of the 2-meter bluff. This looked more recent, maybe a few years ago compared to the 15-year living incursion elsewhere in the long dome. The soil was blackened, with a sandy reddish soil beneath it.

  Wilder cast his helmet light to either side. “Is this round or straight? Could this be a crater?”

  He was thinking aloud. But Kaz took it as a sincere question. “I’ll check.” With that, he craned his neck, selected a corkscrew tree, and scrambled up. Before Wilder could decide whether he was meant to follow, Kaz seized a vine, hacked at it, then swung out over the pit.

  In a minute or so, Kaz jumped back beside him, grinning. “Round, 50 meters. Kiln in the middle.”

  “That was awesome!” Wilder cried. “Can I do that?”

  Kaz still held onto the vine. He shrugged, and pointed to Wilder’s gun.

  Wilder hastily shifted the portable sonic cannon to his back and grasped the vine. “Really?”

  Kaz wasn’t a big talker. He positioned Wilder back a few meters, faced him toward the kiln, and adjusted his grasp high on the vine. Then he shoved.

  Wilder had time for just a few running steps before the crater opened beneath him. He sailed into the hole dangling from the vine, underbrush whipping at him. As his helmet fleetingly rendered the chaotic jungle visible, the growth pattern was as he suspected. No plants reached more than a couple meters tall in the crater. They didn’t look especially robust, either, as though the soil were poisoned.

  He reached the far end of his swing, and slowed to return. At that point a mid-size saber-clawed predator leapt at him. Wilder mentally dubbed it a pocket jaguar. The damn thing was thigh-high, and triple that in length with its powerful tail. One set of claws slashed into Wilder’s leg and stuck in suit and muscle. Its jaw full of teeth snapped inches from his waist.

  He managed to kick the damned thing off, and it fell into the hole beneath. His vine swung him away before the jaguar could leap up again for a rematch. Damn, those slashes burned. And his suit was compromised. He’d catch hell from Copeland about that.

  His more immediate problem was that the jaguar scuffle messed up his pendulum motion. His swing ended with no hunters in sight. “Kaz, Wilder. Find me. Please?”

  At mid-swing, he dropped off the vine in a particularly dead zone, the dispirited undergrowth barely knee-high. He cast around with his light. “There. I think I’m at the kiln.”

  “Coming,” Kaz acknowledged over the comms.

  Wilder scurried toward a broken stone structure, his sonic cannon back in his loving arms. Before he reached it, he nearly fell into a yawning black sub-crater within the greater hole. He teetered at its edge a moment, but managed to catch his balance.

  He carefully sidled around the black hole, then continued on to clamber cautiously onto the most solid-looking remaining wall. He turned to look behind him. He nearly jumped out of his skin to see that Kaz had rejoined him.

  “Kiln,” Kaz mentioned. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Right. Cover me while I send video?”

  “Wait,” Kaz differed, and vanished into the underbrush.

  Torn between studying the fuel-making structure, and defending against his pal the jaguar, Wilder made the right choice. He kept his eyes constantly scanning the underbrush. Kaz didn’t sneak up on him this time. He returned with two others, and a sheaf of arm-length leaves. It was a near thing, but Wilder even managed not to shoot them as they crashed back into view.

  The two new hunters spread out to guard their position. Kaz hunkered down to study the slashes on Wilder’s leg. He repositioned the leg to pour something on it from a flask on his harness. Wilder hissed at the pain. This treatment was hydrogen peroxide, judging by the foam expanding to fire off every nearby pain receptor in the sergeant’s skin.

  Then the hunter broke the stem of a green-and-pink leaf and squeezed its sap into the wound. Apparently this stuff needed a few seconds to do its job, as Kaz settled back on his heels momentarily. Then he broke and folded a wad of purple-and-red leaf. He pulled away his breath mask and popped this into his mouth to chew for a couple minutes.

  Wilder had questions. But Kaz wasn’t likely to answer them with his mouth full of leaf, so he bided his time. The first leaf’s sap made a great painkiller on the foaming peroxide.

  Kaz lifted his faceplate again to spit into his gloved palm. This masticated mess he smeared onto the three cuts in Wilder’s shin. The sergeant didn’t note any particular sensation from this treatment. He didn’t want to think too closely about what bacteria and bakkra just entered his leg, though.

  To his relief, the remaining leaves were apparently bandages. He
vetoed Kaz’s move to cut away the pressure suit. The hunter shrugged and threaded strips of palm-like leaf through the fabric slashes, and around the back to tie on the outside of the high-tech pants.

  Finally he stood. “One hour. Then you need better medicine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No,” Kaz contradicted him with a frown. “Necessary. Do your thing. We must go.”

  “Right. Thank – Right.” Wilder switched his comm to the Thrive. “Ben? Wilder.”

  “Copeland here, go ahead Wilder. You found my kiln!” By which the sergeant figured that the engineer had already found his video feed. “Huh. Talk to me.”

  Aiming his faceplate cameras to illustrate, Wilder explained the burned crater. He shared his theory. He thought locals left a cache of star drive fuel behind near the fuel kiln, probably forgotten and low-priority.

  Fuel pellets didn’t power the engines in their storage form. Water mixed with pellets in an exothermic reaction. The result of that explosion was the actual liquid drive fuel. For this climate, where he could practically squeeze water from the air with his fist, the natives doubtless had extreme water-tight measures to protect the kiln product. He figured the water seal failed one day and kaboom!

  Copeland acknowledged that this story made sense. But the engineer was more invested in the kiln itself. He had Wilder record it systematically, bobbing his head up and down all the way around on the outside. He paid special attention to any protuberances and hatches that survived. Then he had Wilder clamber in and do it again, though the sergeant doubted how useful that could be in the structure’s collapsed condition.

  “Outstanding,” Copeland breathed. “Any chance there’s fuel left?”

  Wilder showed him the blackened deeper hole. Copeland directed him to scope out several meters in every direction from there, stabbing at the ground along the way to hunt for another vault top. But the sergeant didn’t find any.

  “And is this inside or outside the dome?” Cope inquired.

  Wilder switched to the hunter channel to seek second opinions on that one. “Inside a subsidiary dome, they think. Like this was domed, but pressure-locked from the inhabited dome. Maybe at the end of a 4 x 20 meter corridor. How they figure that, I don’t know.”

  “Great job, sergeant. Come on home.”

  “Yeah, about that, chief. My suit is compromised. A creature slashed me. Open wounds.”

  “Sucks to be you,” Cope acknowledged. “Can you seal your suit in the airlock?”

  “Yeah. The locals recommend first aid, though.”

  “Do that first. Then into the airlock and get your suit sealed. And fly home in your pressure suit. If you’re worried about infection, make it quick. Thrive out.”

  Right. “We’re done,” he announced on the hunter channel.

  And as advertised, it did suck very much to quarantine himself in his pressure suit all the way back to Waterfalls. He even had to dock the shuttle and let Zan out, and Ben in. Then Ben dropped him off at the bio-lock entryway. He put the shuttle away, while Wilder worked through decontamination the slow way.

  The peroxide shower stung just as bad as the first time. With Kassidy and Eli off-ship, Copeland served as his ungentle medic today, and made him repeat the shower four times until the gashes quit foaming quite so much. A shame he hadn’t brought any of the nifty painkiller leaves with him. Not that Cope would have allowed them onto his precious ship.

  “Good news, bad news, sarge,” Cope reported by intercom a couple hours later. “The auto-doc should be able to make quick work of that fever you’re sprouting.”

  “It really is a fever?” Wilder had hoped it was just the sticky heat of the bio-lock container, combined with a challenging day.

  “Someone stuck a spit wad in your wound. Yes, it’s really a fever,” Copeland confirmed. “No surprise, a bakkra infection too. We can solve that with nanites, but not the ones in the auto-doc. Eli’s agreed to come back and make you some, with advice from Dr. Yang in Neptune, as translated by Kassidy.”

  “Not you?”

  “I don’t know squat about nanites,” Cope agreed. “Eli should pass through your chamber within a couple hours and get busy on that. Might as well get some sleep. Hopefully you’ll be cleared by tomorrow.”

  The guard mournfully surveyed his final clearance closet, about 2.5 x 1.5 meters. He could curl up on the floor in the corner, he supposed.

  “That glass you brought back is awesome, though,” the engineer continued. “And Dr. Arbus and Seitz back at Hell’s Bells are excited by the kiln design. We’re looking at an entirely different chemical synthetic pathway than we’re used to.”

  “Is this supposed to mean something to me?” Wilder complained.

  “Means you done good,” Cope assured him. “Real good.”

  That was some comfort. The cool of the hard floor on his fevered cheek felt better, though.

  17

  Ten days later, Sass managed the cargo ball, trudging through the deep. Clay walked beside her with his harpoon at the ready, while she wore hers on her back.

  They’d graduated from Dove’s tutelage a few days ago. Denali or not, the dive master was merely human, and they were not. He could not follow where they went next.

  Ocean currents pushed Belker’s ship too deep, dragged its anchor too far from Neptune.

  The 1.5-meter ball she towed was as much lifeline as the ropes they used to mark their way from Neptune to the anchor line. Sass was glad to have left the rope-playing game behind. They followed the anchor chain now, two small forms dimly lit, surrounded by pitch black murk.

  Bat-urchins didn’t like it down here, Sass noted idly. She couldn’t say she blamed them.

  The cargo ball yanked her backward yet again, snagged on a rocky outcrop. The heavy-duty geodesic pressure ball was a beast. It reminded her of those damned 8 containers the Thrive carried most of the way to Denali, only to suddenly become 5, then 4, their supplies gone beyond retrieval. She dislodged the ball and decided to carry it for a little while. This meant shortening its leash to only a few centimeters, held behind her at her waist, fouling her every step. This was a miserable way to shuffle along. But the ocean floor was growing rocky, catching at the ball too often. A current persistently tugged her to the left as she picked her way between stones.

  Her universe tunneled to the next step, and the next, their picnic ball of air tanks and provisions hammering her thighs. Of course they’d gone up for air inside Neptune, more time than they spent in the sea. But then she thought too much. She tried to concern herself with the Thrive. Then her thoughts would careen back to forging a new self-identity as a robot, in ‘love’ with another robot. And she went numb again.

  Out here, in the immediacy of the private, silent deep, she knew something closer to peace.

  Clay was happy. They’d found a sport that could probably kill them. Or possibly just shut them down. Now there was an awful thought. What if they ran out of air down here and – No. Without air the flesh would rot away and die. We wouldn’t awaken. Not unless someone found us within a few months.

  “Freeze,” Clay said.

  Sass held, and pivoted eyes only until she spotted it. A tentacle thicker than Clay’s hips, rich in suction cups, drifted at the limit of her headlamp. She remained frozen for minutes that seemed like hours, aware of the echoing sound of her every breath in the helmet. Aware of a tiny hiss and gurgle from her air tubes. They were 12 meters deeper than Neptune now, and the pressure mounted. The seal on that tube might fail before the end. Not a comforting thought to dwell on, as they waited on the monster.

  Ever so slowly, the tentacle snaked by. At last its girth grew smaller, to the width of Sass’s waist, then leg.

  “Go,” Clay decreed. “We need to make better time. Want me to carry the ball for a while?”

  “Please,” Sass agreed. She didn’t fancy herself much of a hunter. But there was so little she could do if something came hunting her, that it didn’t much matter. And this ocean gre
w noticeably deader by the meter, and cooler. They transferred the ball, and set out again.

  Clay mused, “I think I’ve satisfied my suicidal urges.”

  “Good,” Sass agreed. “I don’t want to die. They’re counting on us. The kids.”

  While they holed up hurting, they’d come to call the entire crew ‘the kids.’ She loved them, her little brood. But she wondered if she’d ever manage to feel a part of them again. They seemed so very young and fresh. Not all, she reminded herself. Eli, Cortez, Copeland – those three knew what it was to live and fail and bleed, time after time. She treasured that about them.

  “To the kids,” he agreed. “Sass, my air hose sprung a leak.”

  She turned to look. Water began to pool at the base of his helmet, still a couple inches below his mouth. “I can’t let you go ahead without me, Clay. My hose is starting to spit, too.”

  “OK,” he agreed. “Its another 60 meters or so. We’ll just have to make it.”

  “A little faster,” she decided, and tried to pick up the pace. It made little difference. The water resistance set their pace.

  Another twenty meters, up and down the jagged rocks, not coated here by enough muck. A blubber-shark passed above them. She paused to watch – this was a creature that needed killing. She and Clay both bagged one to earn their right to leave the habitat without a minder. Actually, Clay bagged two.

  The meat was useless, of course. But its skin and oil were prized by the Neptune natives. In fact, their diving suits were made of blubber-shark skin, a convenient resource here.

  “Go ahead,” she urged Clay. “I’ll follow.”

  He hesitated a moment. “No.”

  She started to argue, but the shark passed out of her vision. “Go, I’m coming.” She hastened to catch up, glad to see he’d turned around to make progress again.