Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  He wished he could say he hadn’t touched anyone in the city. But he had. It was research. And dammit, Cope had over a decade of practice, with men as well as women. Ben had one regrettable experience with a mean girl when he was 15 in Poldark. She publicly humiliated him so badly, he hadn’t a friend left in his home town since. There was the VR sex world. But Cope only took two minutes to demonstrate to Ben just how little the VR captured of the real thing. It was research.

  Yeah, I was manic and not thinking straight, and I carried out my research. I hurt him bad…

  He wasn’t paying attention. Dr. Tyler’s voice rose, irate. “That’s complete and utter nonsense! I examined them. They’re as human as any of us. They have nanites. And bakkra and bacteria, and probably dirt on their feet as well. Human-plus is human.”

  Aurora stepped in as devil’s advocate. “The Mahina scientist – he’s from their ‘urb’ ruling class.” She paused to allow her Denali listeners time to shake their heads and murmur disapproval. Apparently Selectmen didn’t consider themselves a ruling class. Putting on airs in Waterfalls was a serious social gaffe in general. Local society was militantly socialist and egalitarian.

  “Dr. Yang’s argument was that they died,” Aurora pressed on. “And the nanites remembered who they were, and restored them. So they aren’t people, they’re backup programs of memory and personality running on biological hardware.”

  Dr. Tyler shook her head vehemently. “Captain, do you dream? Do you hurt? You obviously care about people.”

  “We both have nightmares,” Clay murmured.

  “Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,” Aurora concluded her case. “They’re people. They’re weird. But to them, we’re weird, too.”

  Aden breathed sharply and nodded. “Thank you for clarifying that. Please, doctor, return to enjoying the party. Good Harvest.”

  Ben got the distinct impression the geezer was not pleased to have Aurora pluck a trump card out of his hand before he’d played it.

  The doctor harrumphed. “I shall speak to Dr. Ayaye about this, I assure you!” She stormed off to find her superior. Ben knew him from a consultation during his internment in Tyler’s clinic. The top medical authority in Waterfalls lived in the hunter dome, where urgent care and surgery were needed more often.

  Sass smiled. “I’m so glad that’s cleared up. Thank you, Aurora. But we have an appointment back at the ship. No, Aurora, you stay and enjoy your holiday.”

  Ben fell in beside her as they marched back toward the ship. Along the dome roof lines were the only safe paths in this part of the forest complex. Ben was glad for the hard-core glass brick they were constructed from. He could almost set the Thrive down on these ‘glass domes.’

  “Dr. Yang really accused you of being a cyborg?” he asked. “Pompous rego urb, huh?”

  She turned a brilliant smile on him as though he’d made her day. “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “What?” he asked. “You come back from the dead. We knew that. Hey, cap, about Cope –”

  She threw her hands up to fend him off. “I’ll help if I have to. But you have to try yourself first.”

  Clay apparently disagreed. From her other side, he suggested, “Don’t make excuses. Offer your most abject apologies and tell him you’re beneath contempt. Lay it on deep and thick with the self-loathing and horror, at the dark depths that you never suspected dwelled in your heart. Don’t let up on the self-flagellation until he tries to convince you that you’re not so bad.”

  Sass nodded judiciously. “Grovel. Might work. Time, also. Maybe a lot of time.”

  “Damn. What’s this meeting about, anyway?” Ben was the last to be freed from Dr. Tyler’s ministrations, because he was the last to be found.

  “What we learned from Belker’s ship.” Sass paused a moment, and added grudgingly, “And Dr. Yang.”

  22

  Abel lifted his head from his arms on the dining table as Sass and Clay arrived for the briefing. Still nauseous and weak as a kitten, he and his wife served as Dr. Tyler’s first test subjects, proving out every purgative technique she could imagine, from stomach pumping, to the chalky pink drink, to fiery hot peppers, and finally the diarrhea-inducing med Tyler selected as the ‘most comfortable.’

  In the process, he hadn’t added any food fuel to his system in 48 hours. His heady couple days of manic euphoria left his brain wrung dry of feel-good endorphins. And worst of all, he deserved every minute of this misery. He was in charge. He screwed up big-time.

  And Sass, looking the blooming picture of robust health as always, projected happy confidence across the room as she took her place at the head of the table.

  “Hello, hello! And welcome back!” she boomed. Abel winced. “I see you’re all on the mend.” She paused to count heads. “Who are we missing? Jules.”

  “Our bathroom,” Abel supplied in a froggy whisper. The projectile vomiting phase did a number on his vocal chords. He hoped his wife would cease her disconsolate sobbing soon. Beside him, a strung out Eli rocked in a disturbing way, and stared at his fists clenched before him. Cope, across from them, flat-out refused further treatment after Farmer’s Joy. The engineer looked relaxed and capable, the swine, though he kept his back turned on Ben, who watched him mournfully like a kicked puppy. Wilder and Cortez appeared hung over. Kassidy, who pranced in just before Sass, never ‘drank the kool-aid,’ away on the Neptune expedition to collect her dad.

  “I’m sorry,” Abel announced to the room in general. “I screwed up. That was bad judgment.”

  “Mm, yes,” Sass agreed. “A more cautious approach would have been prudent. But an excellent find, Abel. After a little product development, we’ll take quite a lot of the enteric bacteria pills back to Mahina with us. I’m sorry for everyone’s discomfort. But this episode highlighted yet another weak spot in settler medicine that can easily be remedied.” She beamed at him. “Well done.”

  “Really?”

  Sass tilted her head. “A few points off for style. We’ll discuss it later. Our main goal with this meeting is to share what we learned in Neptune, and our spiffy new starship. Note star ship. The Nanomage comes to us from another star system. Let’s start there. Cope?”

  “Huh? Oh.” The engineer rose and took his tablet to the foot of the table. He set his screen to echo on the big display, and selected pictures to illustrate his points. “You’ve seen the second ship parked in the yard, Nanomage. Its key features are a 3rd generation star drive, and a warp lens. Looks like that.”

  The warp lens looked like a microwave oven with a heavy-duty power cord akin to the high-voltage plug of a refrigerator.

  “Both of these items,” he continued, flipping to an image of the star drive, “are one-of-a-kind in the Aloha system. We’ve never seen this tech before. Well, maybe Sass and Clay have.”

  Clay offered, “We never saw the warp lens on Vitality. Are you sure that’s it?”

  “Yup. Travel 1.5 years perpendicular to the ecliptic, plug it in, set a destination, hit the Go button, and voila, you’re suddenly light years away. Takes a lot of power.” Copeland scratched his nose ruefully. “But not this much power. The Manatee – the ship that brought the urbs to Mahina – ran on first-gen star drives. The second-gen drives were developed before the Vitality brought us settlers. And during all that refugee transport, somebody developed a tweak for this third-gen drive.

  “Why do we care? Because this drive and its fuel are a massive improvement over what we came here with. The third-gen fuel can give 40% more power to our main drive. The new drive is 65% more powerful, though less if we feed it second-gen fuel. Our backup first gen drive can’t use the new fuel. I propose we swap it out, rather than maintain two different fuel systems in a single engine room.”

  Wilder leaned forward, intent. “Do we overhaul the fueling system?” He and Kassidy bore the brunt of feeding the insatiable maw of the fuel hopper on atmospheric entry. It wasn’t possible for them to work hard enough, fast enough, to supply the highe
r demand to burn their way out of this gravity hole.

  “We do,” Copeland agreed. “Hopefully, we run on the new third generation fuel only. Of which we expect none on Denali, except in the Nanomage’s tanks.”

  “And we know how to make it?” Eli pressed.

  Cope grinned. “Found that in its database. Full chemical manufacturing instructions. Already sent it to Markley on Mahina and Seitz at Hell’s Bells. They were already able to independently make the stuff and confirm it gets a whopping 40% performance upgrade out of every second-gen star drive. That’s the most common power generator on Mahina. Abel, you’re going to love our share of the profits on that deal.”

  Abel appeared incapable of loving anything, least of all himself. Cope chuckled quietly.

  He summed up. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. But with the new drive, and enough of the new fuel, we should be able to lift with our full kit of 8 containers. I know how to make the fuel. And this is my design for the fueling system.”

  He tossed that schematic up on the screen without any real hope of appreciation. He was wrong. Kassidy, then Wilder, rose and stepped closer to study the diagram in earnest. The new system would tuck into the short-ceiling section of the engine room under the shuttle nook. The old hand-fed hopper was replaced by grabby robotic arms that took the barrel whole, no pouring or removing the empties. It could hold 10 bundles worth of dry pellets before mixing with water to ignite into the usable version in the gas and liquid tanks beneath the floor.

  “We can’t refuel manually during takeoff,” Cope murmured to them. “The g-forces prevent any useful work. So there’s a major increase in tankage here, plus the hopper volume. We’ll still have to refill once we’re out of the atmosphere, but hopefully not too soon.”

  Kassidy murmured, “We wouldn’t make it without this, would we.”

  “No.”

  “And you knew this all along?” Wilder demanded.

  Sass interrupted smoothly, “Please be seated. Copeland and I were aware of the technical hurdles. Nanomage has improved our options substantially.”

  “And the steel glass Wilder found,” Copeland added. “I didn’t understand that material was so easy to get.”

  Wilder looked pleased.

  “Beyond our immediate problems,” Sass resumed, “with our percentage on this new fuel, and the advanced star drive, our profits on this voyage are already assured. But our true mission is to improve settler lives on Mahina. A sudden 40% increase in power back home will go far. That’s our bottom line. Thank you, Cope.”

  “I had a question,” the engineer noted, as he took his tablet back to his seat. “Did you have permission to take that starship? And the star drive?”

  Sass exchanged a glance with Clay. “Always easier to gain forgiveness than permission. Without us, the ship was already lost to them.”

  “Salvage claim,” Clay suggested.

  Cope replied, “Respect, cap. But you and me already served prison time on Mahina and Sagamore. Let’s not add Denali, alright?”

  She sighed. “Point.”

  “Question,” Abel spoke up. “Cope, you said you know how. But do you have the materials to make these newfangled pellets?”

  “Not yet,” the engineer replied.

  Abel pressed, “And are these the last major issues you need to solve?”

  “Need, yes,” Cope agreed. “But I want more protein and steel printer stock. And we need new containers. Whole lot of stuff on my priority wish list.”

  Sass said, “Let’s table that for now. Clay, you’re up next. What we’ve learned about the rest of humanity. Highlights only, please.”

  “When the Gannies left Aloha,” Clay commenced his spiel, “Belker included, they returned to the Sol system – Earth. But they never left the warp point. From there, all they picked up was automated distress beacons. And they did what we suspected was possible, but never knew for sure. They immediately instigated a second warp, to the Gannies’ backup location, a system named Sanctuary, with their own bolt-hole planet as its only colony.”

  Clay raised a wait finger, and placed an image of a planet on the big display, mostly brown land, short on clouds, but with one continent-sized pocket ocean. “I need to correct that. This backup planet was for the Colony Corps, not Ganymede alone. The officers on all the refugee ships knew the coordinates. You see, no one ever really believed that the billion left behind on Earth would stay there to die without a fight. And sadly, that seems to be what happened. Desperate ships of would-be colonists boiled out of Earth to take the colonies on the Moon, Mars, and Ganymede. The locals had the advantage. But outnumbered a hundred to one, they didn’t stand a chance. The large space colonies were destroyed.”

  Sass murmured, “There were asteroid mining platforms.”

  “There were,” Clay agreed. “We don’t believe any of the Colony Corps ships chose to enter the Sol System to rescue survivors. Their orders stated, if in doubt, proceed to Sanctuary. Sass, you can’t blame them. Sol has resources at least five orders of magnitude greater than the colonies. And all too many people available to figure it out. Whereas we have little, and the colony crews had no space for extra bodies. The Gannies simply left the Earth folk to it.”

  “Go on,” she conceded.

  “About 8,000 reached Sanctuary,” Clay continued. “We think maybe 5,000 crewed the refugee ships. It’s possible some came from the long-range explorer ships and returning terraformers. I think about 3,000 launched from Mars. And they now control Sanctuary. A colony of 8,000 is not viable for much except to regress to the Stone Age. The planet itself is a better prize than Denali. Middle of the Goldilocks zone, mostly desert but arable around the salty sea. No pre-existing biome, negligible atmosphere. Gravity about 0.4 g. Harder to render livable than Mahina, because it’s bigger. And they don’t have the labor head count. So they live like urbs, in a single dome complex, and try to maintain their technology level.”

  “Playing a losing game,” Sass added.

  “Yes and no,” Clay quibbled. “Like the 3rd generation star drive, they advanced in a number of technologies compared to us. And like the nanite advances they learned from Mahina, they brought back know-how from all the urb-wave terraformers. So for a few decades, they were the most advanced human society in the galaxy, if a trifle small. And they knew where all the other colonies were.

  “One item that disturbs me,” Clay continued. “Of the 10 colony worlds, three failed before the Colony Corps reached them with the refugee ships. The crews – these were from Mars and the Moon – left the settlers to their fate. No one really expected these colonies to make it. One shared a system with another colony that was viable. Unfortunately, the other two were in the same system.”

  Sass prompted, “And then there was Belker.”

  Clay nodded. “Belker stole the Nanomage in a vote of no confidence. I suppose it’s a comfort that out of all known star systems, he chose ours. Anyway, the Nanomage’s databases are vast, a much higher density storage capacity than anything we’ve got. We might make more money on the technology it contains. Belker headed for Mahina for the nanites, then found Sass and I were still alive. So he fled to Denali instead.”

  “Where he died,” Kassidy offered.

  “We’ve started a campaign to butter up the nanite specialists at Mahina Actual,” Kassidy continued her spiel. “I’m recording lectures now, Dad sharing his advances since he left the city. I’m in touch with Atlas Pratt in the city, and Hunter Burke – Clay’s son – for the settler government. I don’t expect any problem getting clearance for him to return to Mahina as a free man. But, worst case, Hunter’s assured us asylum in Schuyler.”

  “With funding for his research?” Sass asked.

  Kassidy admitted, “Not that far along yet. But if all else fails, Dad can run a nanite shop pay-for-service for settlers. We’d just prefer he not run a business. Because he doesn’t know how, and he doesn’t care. But if that’s necessary, we can find him a business manager. The way
Sass originally intended with Josiah.”

  Clay sat back with fingers steepled. “Any benefit to Mahina in the meantime?”

  “To the other nanite specialists, certainly,” Kassidy replied. “To the settlers? Not so much. Any other questions?”

  Wilder spoke up. “Does your father really consider Sass and Clay cyborgs?”

  Kassidy could have tossed her head and passed that off with a quip. Instead she elected to take it seriously. “What is life? If they have mimicked life for 70 years, aren’t they alive? Aurora and Dr. Tyler just told the Waterfalls Selectmen their verdict. These are people. Oh, and you’ll be glad to know, we’re calling you two John Smith and Jane Doe in Dad’s lectures.”

  “Ah, we appear,” Sass murmured.

  Kassidy confessed, “Centrally, I’m afraid. What Dad said that first day, about nanites minus the in-body controllers, is what he proposes for the settlers. No copies of memories and consciousness, no personalized controllers. If you die, rest in peace.”

  “Thank you, Kassidy,” Sass acknowledged, pulling herself upright. “And now my turn. We still need fuel, badly. And Selectman Aden says we need to visit Denali Prime as soon as possible.”

  “Why is Denali Prime still a priority?” Clay asked.

  Sass pointed a finger toward Copeland to reply. “We can convert second generation fuel to third generation. That’s easier than making the pellets from scratch. Also, the bulk stuff I need is the same for both. Prime is where they made it. I’d like an answer sooner rather than later, on what we’re doing for fuel.”

  Sass nodded. “Also, the Denali request our help. They lost all their aircraft at Prime, and want an aerial survey of the damage. Goodwill matters.

  “So here’s what we’re going to do.”

  23

  “The upside to devastation,” Sass quipped, slowing the Nanomage to hover 100 meters over what was once downtown Denali Prime. “No wildlife.” Their flight was briefly harassed by a few pterry and other flying mega-pests along the way. But now their sky gleamed clear turquoise and predator-free under the hot sun.