by Ginger Booth
They chose to swap sky drives before this expedition, equipping Nanomage with a first generation drive and second generation fuel. Copeland transferred some sensors and asteroid-mining guns as well. The newly sluggish craft should be sufficient for the purpose. But the process took a couple weeks, fraying the tempers of the Waterfalls Selectmen, and putting the sun higher in their sky. Sunrise and sunset were now separate and fleeting segments of the brutal day, now stretching to 7 of Denali’s 20 hours.
Zan rode shotgun, in a bridge that offered 2nd row seating. Clay leaned forward between them to drink in the post-apocalyptic view. The two guilty volcanoes still smoldered, sending thin streamers sailing aloft. Another trio of tall cones sat silent, their flanks free of trees, facing off against the miscreants across a broad valley. Beneath, the landscape was pure grey from ash and pyroclastic flow. The black of recent lava glinted in the distance under rippling heat waves.
“Turn the view?” Kassidy requested.
Zan complied, slowly showing off 360 degrees of ash-covered slopes. Kassidy recorded the scene without commentary until the end. “Rest in peace, Denali Prime. Population was what, 30,000? Like Mahina Actual.”
“Don’t know,” Zan replied shortly.
“About that,” Clay murmured agreement.
Sass sighed. “Well, let’s get to it. Zan, do our maps sync?”
They bent heads to synchronize their devices, and make sure they were oriented correctly. There weren’t exactly landmarks below to go by. Even the slopes to the valley’s river didn’t quite match the altitude plots. The ash layer seemed to vary from 1 to 6 meters deep, tending to level out the landscape’s rugged dips. The river itself was completely hidden.
Once they were as sure as they could manage that their maps were right, Sass guided them over the spaceport that was. The city’s extensive agricultural domes spread outward up the slopes from the cosmo domes in the center near the river, with protective hunters at the periphery. She sought an open area not far from the industrial zone for her gun tests. The spaceport fit the bill.
Not really expecting much, she began a sensor pass. These were borrowed from Thrive, the Nanomage not being equipped for prospecting. Directly below, as expected, she picked up ash and gravel, set by rainfall to the approximate texture of concrete, 2.5 meters deep. A few spots showed high metal content, likely crushed sky ships and shuttles.
Or would they be crushed? She opened a comm link. “Cope, Sass. Got a sec? Would the Thrive survive under 2.5 meters of ash?”
“Easily, I think. Need me to calculate that out?”
“Could you? Call me back. Sass out.” She marked the possible skyships on the map. Then she sent her sensors roving toward the dome closest to the spaceport. And she froze. “No…”
Zan leaned toward her display in alarm. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s hollow,” Sass whispered.
Clay didn’t wait for her. “Cope, Clay. Are the domes able to withstand 2.5 meters of ash?”
“The domes are tougher than a skyship,” Cope replied. “Steel glass brick, arches to displace forces. Same stuff they built Neptune out of. Why?”
Clay pressed, “How about life support? Could the domes still support life buried under that much ash?”
“Wow. Each one separately, no. The cosmo domes generate too much CO2. The ag domes require too much CO2 and generate O2. But combine them, and recycle the water, and could be. Rego hell. You don’t think they’re alive in there all this time, do you?”
“That’s what we’re wondering,” Clay agreed.
“Four months,” Sass murmured. “And we’ve been here wasting time for two of them.”
Cope couldn’t hear her. “My best guess? At least some of the domes lost pressure. Lava, hurling boulders, whatever. The chances that everyone survived down there are nil. But some, yeah, that’s possible.”
“Why didn’t we think of this before?” Sass mourned.
Clay responded, “Because the locals told us the city was destroyed. We believed them.”
Sass turned to speak to Clay’s comm, wiping a few furious tears from her cheek. “Cope, what would it take for Thrive to evacuate them?”
“Cap –”
“I didn’t say to do it,” Sass argued. “We don’t know that anyone’s alive yet. Just start thinking about it.”
“Aye, cap. And Sass? Be careful with those lasers next to a dome unless you’re sure it’s dead. The ash might behave like concrete – basically explode on contact at low power. And those lasers could cut right through the steel glass.”
“Got it. Thanks, Cope.”
Clay cut the comms. “Sass, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to complete the sensor sweep, don’t we?”
“Yeah. It’s just, the idea that we’ve been sitting around for two months –”
“Stop,” Zan interrupted. “Hermitage monitored the situation here. Their balloons said it was too hot to go in until Harvest Festival. The volcanoes were still erupting. And now we’re here.” The captain’s emotional reaction clearly pissed him off.
Under the pressure of his hostility, Sass sniffled a few last times and buckled down to work.
“Tools down!” Copeland called out in the engine room. “I need your attention.” He waited for his Denali hirelings to finish what they were doing on the new fueling bay. Skilled technicians all, no one would leave a screw half-screwed or similar sin.
When they were ready, he told them about their first reports from Denali Prime, that there was a possibility – not yet confirmed! – that there could be survivors trapped below the ash. “I’ve been asked to make contingency plans. My critical path is to get this fuel system up and running again, so Thrive can ferry wounded from Prime to Waterfalls.”
A hand rose from the front ranks, Reza, the Denali senior technician. Cope nodded for him to go ahead. “How many can you usefully put to work? Skilled and semi-skilled.”
“You and I should put our heads together and figure that out.”
Reza shook his head emphatically. “I can finish in here. I want 6 more, skilled. I’m asking how many you want for everything else you need to do.”
“Reza, I don’t have a go-ahead yet, or clearance to pay more people.”
The man flung an offended hand out and away. “Forget pay! Have you told the Selectmen yet?”
“Abel is speaking to them right now. But again, we do not know yet that there are survivors,” Copeland stressed, to all the workers. “This is a contingency.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Reza agreed. “But if there are, you need your bio-lock figured out. Let us get your fuel system ready to fly. Tell me when you need more techs. Tell the Selectmen everything else. But Dr. Tyler needs to get here now. Now go, you’ve got work to do. So do we.”
Cope strode forward and grasped his arm. “Thank you.”
Abel slipped behind Jules at the kitchen counter. He put his hands on her hips and kissed her neck. “Sweetie, sorry to bother you making lunch, but…”
He told her about the possibility of Thrive serving as a rescue vessel. That the Waterfalls Selectmen were sending over advance planning teams. Cope was laying on staff to work around the clock.
Jules didn’t interrupt. Her hands never stopped flying. Most of what she’d planned for lunch got dumped into a tub and thrust into the fridge for another time. With a bump of her hip, she ordered the half-full dishwasher to finish up. Out came the bulk proteins and ready-to-bake breads, for sandwiches to feed a small army. The salad fixings could be incorporated as-is.
“Seven beds free in crew berthing,” she pointed out after he finished. “I’ll make sure they know which. A couple bigwigs can sleep in Sass and Clay’s cabins. Buffet will be ready in 25 minutes, and served continuously til this is over. I’ll bring sandwiches around so they don’t have to leave their work.”
“I love you, Jules!”
She swatted his hand away. “You figure out how to carry more people in the hold, Abel Greer! I won’t have si
ck people piled on my floor, and hanging off the catwalk! Not in my home, sir!”
“Will do.” His tablet buzzed. “That’s the doctor arriving.” He kissed his wife and high-tailed it down to the bio-lock to expedite Tyler’s way in. She wore a pressure suit from the dome, broiling in the late morning sun, in order to pass through the lock as expeditiously as possible. Alas, washing off her indoor skin bakkra would take time. Selectman Gorey buzzed just a moment later. Abel asked him to wait so that the less-contaminated Tyler could clear the first chamber of the lock before handling his far heavier load of outdoor wild bakkra.
Another call recruited Dr. Yang to help Dr. Tyler figure out their medical arrangements.
Once Abel was confident the newcomers were passing through decontamination as quickly as feasible, he inventoried his supply of tarps, then added in all the sheets not currently in use. Hammocks, he decided, studying the cavernous space of the hold.
“Cortez,” he hailed over his comm. “Cope put you to work yet?”
“I’m supposed to be security,” she complained. “How I’m supposed to do that, when you’ve invited half of Waterfalls in for a party, I don’t know.”
“Never mind that,” Abel ordered. “Well, correction. You need to enforce bio-lock procedures. But assume everyone coming in today is trusted. Mostly I need a hand in the cargo hold to upgrade our max occupancy.”
“On my way.”
Ben slipped into his cabin, replying to Cope’s summons over the comm. “What’s up, buddy?”
Cope – who’d barely touched him since his unfortunate dose of Manic Joy – stood from his bed and gathered him into his arms for a kiss. By way of explanation, he offered, “Everything else? That’s done. Love you. We work this as partners. Agreed?”
“Absolutely,” Ben breathed. “Love you too. I have your back. Always.” He pulled away and stood at-ease, the most formal posture anyone ever assumed on the Thrive. “What do you need from me, chief?”
Cope smiled and nodded approval. “You’re second engineer as well as third officer. Either you or me is on duty at all times.”
Ben frowned. “Cortez?” She was Cope’s usual assistant these days.
“No. She’s great. Minor repairs, just point her at it and delegate. But you’re the one with formal training in LS&P.” Life Support & Power was the most generic of engineering disciplines on Mahina. Ben was currently pursuing his senior year of university in that basic degree. “If it’s tricky or novel, or needs figuring out, you’re the one, not her. And she’s on security.”
“Alright. What have you got for me?”
“Our critical path is getting the fuel system back online, and a way to bio-lock people in and out. You know that problem.”
Ben grinned. The two of them had worked together every step of the way to devise Thrive’s bio-lock. “Sure, I can own that one.” He paused and frowned a moment. “Two bio-locks. Minimum.”
Cope smiled back. “Good man. Two is better. And they need to be portable. We grapple them up, bring them along with us –”
“And get people to them from a distance, who don’t necessarily have air masks –”
“– Might not even be able to walk.”
They put their heads together and brainstormed the challenges out in the galley. That way their growing throng of minions could easily interrupt to ask questions.
24
Sass found the quick hookup between Nanomage’s computers and Thrive’s sensors to be sadly mushy. Checking in one direction, a hole in the debris field might appear as much as a couple meters off its location when measured on a different heading.
Their maps of Denali Prime weren’t exact, to put it mildly. The sort of survey work that precisely delineated land tracts was simply irrelevant in this rain forest turned volcanic sarcophagus. The locals decided by eye where to place a new dome or a linking corridor. They acknowledged no private land ownership beyond assigned living quarters. They considered possessiveness a character flaw.
Given all that, the team soon decided to ignore their city plans, such as they were. They mapped only what the sensors told them of holes below. Sass moved the ship up the recently-active volcano slopes and commenced sweeps from there until she started to detect the first air pocket. That one didn’t stretch far, no more than 50 meters, buried 5 meters deep.
Sass paused, hovering over the site. “Zan, wouldn’t we have communications? If they were alive.”
“The ground lines were destroyed by lava flows,” he reasoned. “The satellite we had until you arrived wasn’t worth much. I doubt they would have thought to contact that. They couldn’t come out because it was too hot, so they couldn’t use radio. They don’t have line of sight to Hermitage, anyway.”
“No,” Clay agreed. “Lack of communication doesn’t tell us much. They probably wouldn’t dare to open the domes to try. And open them to what? The underside of a concrete tomb? Sass, keep going. Truly, love. Map it all before we decide where to begin. Let’s try to finish by sunset.”
In the event, it was past sunset by the time they’d covered the full extent of what used to be Denali Prime, plus an extra half kilometer on the margins to allow for error and old records, except one additional side ravine where the sensors reported a hollow running an extra klick.
That was probably the track of some stream, but Sass surveyed it meticulously. If she were caught down there, and she had air tanks, what better path to follow than a tunnel ready-hewn by water?
The ravine was the farthest reach from the spaceport. None of the underground pockets reached beyond the pyroclastic ash field. And they still didn’t know that any were inhabited.
Clay insisted they set down and rest for supper. Sass had been in the pilot seat since before dawn. Not that dawn was especially early – they left Waterfalls at 07:00, and landed at 18:00, of the 20-hour day.
Sass grudgingly partook of dinner in the galley, prepared by Eli and Wilder. Five of them from the Thrive came on this expedition, including Kassidy, plus three Denalis, Kaz and Aurora in addition to Zan.
The Nanomage offered some treadmills in lieu of any space large enough for running. She beat one of those for half an hour to relieve her frustration. By then it was after 19:00, time for good little Denalis to go to bed during the short 20-hour clock of Spring.
Denalis of generation 5, the rendition she had along, were carefully bred to break their Earth-heritage circadian rhythms. Sass and Clay didn’t have that advantage. She was fed up with 20 hour days and a perpetual case of jet lag.
“I’m continuing,” she announced at the door of the intimate galley. “Anyone who’d rather go to bed, have fun.”
Zan, Kaz, and Wilder immediately leapt to their feet, eager for action.
Clay leaned back from his galley bench, thunking his head into the wall. “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know –” Sass stopped herself and considered the question. “Start with gun tests. Away from any dome or possible skyship. Calibrate the guns. Make sure I know how much power to cut how deep, and how accurately.”
“Where?” Clay demanded, pulling out his tablet.
Unlike the Thrive, they didn’t have a big display on the wall for presentations. So far as they could tell, Nanomage began life as a courier ship. Though why Sanctuary built such a ship was unclear. Clay’s theory was that it was intended to travel out to warp radius, then warp as many times as it had power for. It would listen for broadcasts from surviving colonies, then return with the information. Sass conceded that seemed as good a use for it as any.
She squeezed in at the table, leaning between Clay and Aurora, to study her survey map, overlaid now on the city plans. The two coincided most closely here at the spaceport, because this was her reference point, the location she originally selected to begin her search for a fuel pellet depot. Farther out, she’d need to shift map layers to make structures realign.
“Aurora, Zan, Kaz,” she murmured. “Do you remember any structures on the spaceport that
might house fuel?”
“You dare!” Zan growled. “To search for fuel before survivors!”
“Peace, Zan,” Sass placated him. “I don’t want to shoot a fuel depot. For fear I’d risk the lives of survivors.”
Shooting pellets wouldn’t ignite anything directly. But it would break open the storage in an uncontrolled fashion. Then when it rained, any fuel she spilled would explode spectacularly.
Zan sheepishly backed down.
Aurora peered at the map, and Sass retreated to give her room. The Denali rotated the little tablet on the table, and tilted her head one way, then the other. “I think here was an observation window onto the spaceport. We waited for the skyship to board.” She placed her finger on a red blob that marked not an air gap, but a chunk of metal, a suspected skyship.
“The gear hangers were here.” She sketched in a long rectangle with a question mark for uncertainty. “And there’s another ship, we think. I’m sorry, that’s not very useful, is it.”
“Maybe it is,” Clay argued. “Sass, if I were running a spaceport, would I put anything right here?” He planted a finger tip in the empty middle between those landmarks.
“No, you’d keep that space clear,” Sass agreed. “Good job, team. Then I want to pulverize the ash from here to here?” She traced a line from the bare spot to just outside Aurora’s observation wall. “There’s a bio-lock there, right, Aurora?”
“Good thought,” Aurora murmured. “I think…here was an airlock exit. The bio-lock in, maybe there? I’m sorry, Sass, it’s been years since I visited the capital.”
“Separate doors in and out?” Sass confirmed. Then she looked an inquiry to her hunter counterparts. But they shook their heads.
“We only traveled here by armor,” Zan explained. “I never saw the spaceport. That’s a cosmo dome.” Kaz concurred.
