Interplanetary Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  Sass frowned. “I feel like you’re working up to offering advice. Unsolicited advice.”

  “There’s that,” he allowed.

  “But I need some.”

  “Come to me, and just unload. Sass, you punish the guilty, and move on. That allows everyone else to move on. The worst leadership move is to hold a grudge.” He leaned down and whispered into her ear so it tickled. “I don’t think cleaning up for a spoiled princess helped you let it go.”

  Sass snorted. “She was after you.”

  “She did mention that. I was kinda glad. Figured it might make you appreciate me a little more. Now ask me whether I was interested in her. They’re children, Sass, most of them. You’re their boss, not their mom.”

  “I was so hungry for friends.”

  “You got me, even on the bad days. Most days, you’ve got all of us. Just don’t do the people-pleasing thing, OK? We need a leader. Some days, you need to get mean. Today was one of those days.”

  “I could flunk her on inspection in the morning.”

  “Maybe you could delegate,” Clay advised. “Let Ben decide when her room is clean enough. And let Abel choose her penance.”

  Sass snickered. Logic be damned, there were no greater Kassidy critics today than the first mate and Copeland’s ‘domestic partner’ Ben. “You’re evil. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

  “While you stand back, smiling a private little smile, humming above the fray. And enjoy vicarious satisfaction over how they make her squirm.”

  She laughed and rolled over. “Thanks, Clay. I needed that.” She studied his face as he amicably switched to massaging her front. “Tell me we shouldn’t turn back.”

  “We shouldn’t turn back. We’re going to Denali. This won’t be the last setback.”

  He was right. Fire in the engines might only be the warmup challenge. And 5 straight months of good morale and camaraderie was probably impossible.

  13

  Day 32 outbound from Mahina

  121 days to Denali

  Kassidy anxiously awaited the sunset crowd at the dining table. Beers at the ready, plus cocktail snacks, and over a hundred flat subway tiles in 24 colors. Abel, barely less grouchy today than the day he flunked her cabin cleaning and took over as her probation officer, appointed her to make sunset drinks special this week.

  So far it seemed like the crew quite enjoyed having her as scapegoat. Abel insisted this was her chance to break out of the doghouse. Jules insisted the party plan was fun and constructive. The 15-year-old Jules, who Kassidy previously mentored as a baby sister, was now her boss.

  She wanted engineering instead of housekeeping. But Cortez got that gig.

  “You both got bachelor’s degrees,” Copeland had commented. “She wants to matter. You want people to look at you. Housekeeping is a better fit.”

  The engineer even implemented Cortez’s suggestion for a stopgap on how to prevent recurrence of the accident. He picked her idea over Ben’s, even. Ben thought a drip basin on the floor would help. Cortez recommended a bigger plant no-go zone, painted on the floor with bosses sticking up to remind you, just like the no-go zone around the star drives. And a sealed lip around the refueling area, at shin-cracking height.

  And then Copeland designed a new external fuel storage and loading system. His mentor back on Mahina offered him a 5% kickback to let his engineering firm build and install the retrofits. Thrive provided compelling engine room fire video for the sales material. Other skyships had mimicked Thrive’s trailblazing use of the sky drives for hydroponics, so they needed to consider this new fire risk. The engineers and owners would make a rego profit off the fiasco. Copeland said they’d have to wait until they got home to for the Thrive to get the upgrade, unfortunately.

  Dammit, Cortez was a dim bulb compared to Kassidy. And here she was party-planning and making a big stinking deal out of decorative wall tile –

  With an effort, she forced herself to smile. Party. My goal is a great sunset!

  “Keep trying there, Kass,” Wilder encouraged, chopping vegetables for Jules at the kitchen end of the galley. He grinned and winked at her.

  She resolutely turned her back. She still thought he ought to be taking at least some of the heat for this – Smile!

  Abel strolled in first, promptly at 17:00, the officer of the watch. “Happy sunset!” she greeted him. “Beer?”

  “One couldn’t hurt,” Abel allowed. “What’s this?” His fingers leafed through the pretty tiles.

  She’d left sheets of plastic around the table, with an example tiling in fire engine red, vivid orange, and deep gold. “Everyone gets to redecorate their bathroom! I mean, I install that for them. But this evening we play with patterns, and you pick your colors!” She turned and flipped on the big display monitor, featuring the head for Abel and Jules’ cabin. She highlighted several swatches of wall in turn, spinning the model room to show them off. “You can choose tile for these pink regions. Any of them, or all of them. Whatever colors or patterns you’d like.”

  “Wasn’t this your job for the week?” Abel queried, frowning at his private bathroom displayed so prominently on the wall.

  “Yeah,” Kassidy agreed, a touch too defensively. “So I made all the sample tiles, and the 3D models. And we can all play together designing our bathrooms. For sunset.”

  Judging by his face, the first mate considered this an epic fail for a happy hour party theme.

  “I’m dying to see your color choices, Abel!” Jules called out from the kitchen. “We’ll both pick, and then show each other. Won’t that be fun?”

  Abel’s eyes narrowed. They hadn’t been married long. But this was clearly a trap.

  Cope wandered in behind him and clapped him on the back. “At least you only have one person to please.” He claimed a beer and took a long draw. He picked up a ruby-red tile and held it up to the light to examine its ceramic quality and depth of color. “Not bad. And these were quick once you got going?”

  Naturally, the engineer was the one who set up the printer and materials, and taught her how to make the tiles. “Yes! It was fun. You’re a great teacher, Cope.”

  He cynically flicked his eyes up to catch hers. He selected another tile with a ditsy flower print on it. “That’s a veto,” he commented, flipping it over and pushing it toward the beer. “Reject.”

  Kassidy decorated that one by hand, with a paintbrush, for her own bath. “That –”

  “Why are we rejecting that one?” Abel asked.

  “Feminine turf grab,” Copeland muttered. “Make her cabin too repulsive for me to claim it. Out of bounds for this operation.”

  “But you don’t want my cabin,” Kassidy reasoned.

  “Ben and I have more room in our current cabin,” Cope rationalized. “Palatial bathroom. But it’s a 4-man. If we pick up more people, you go in there, and I take your cramped cabin.”

  “Oh,” she said deflated. “I mean, that’s totally fair.”

  Copeland chuckled and took a long pull of his beer. “Keep trying, Kassidy. You’ll turn into a real girl yet.” He claimed a tray and laid out a bold pattern of ruby red, cool tan, white, and battleship gray.

  Abel called into the kitchen, “How about a hint, Jules? Warm, cool, neutral?” By now the others were drifting in – Sass and Clay, Eli, Cortez, and Ben.

  “You got a model like that for our bathroom, Yang?” Cope asked her.

  She enjoyed being called Yang only slightly less than Kass. But she hastily put the 3D model of the big bunkroom showers onto the screen. She took a picture of his pattern and laid it as a tactful accent strip along one edge of the showers. Copeland watched how it was done, and duplicated his bold tiling across every available pink zone.

  “Now that’s bold,” Ben allowed.

  “That ought to wake us up in the morning!” Wilder chimed in.

  Cortez timidly suggested, “Maybe we could each have a panel, you see? Between the showers and on each end?” She was toying with blue and purple. S
he snapped a shot and placed them in a single strip between showers. It looked dreadful with Copeland’s pattern. Pretty much anything would look dreadful with his assertive choices except maybe single-color panels of the same.

  “You don’t want your bathroom redone,” Sass suggested to Clay. The man couldn’t replicate his deluxe waterfall stone and plants bathing grotto from Mahina Actual in the tiny stateroom head. He’d settled on paneling everything in aspen wood, sealed with umpteen layers of polyurethane.

  Nevertheless he played with the tiles. “A suggestion for you.”

  “Reminds me of rain on the Hudson,” Sass opined. “In the brown of winter.”

  “Exactly,” Clay replied, pleased. “To cool off, and be thoughtful, a trillion miles away from here. Detach.”

  “I’ll save off Copeland’s design,” Kassidy suggested. “Each of you play. Then the four of you can compare at the end and decide. Cortez, you can design the whole bathroom your way.” She smiled hopefully.

  Cortez shot a glance between Copeland and Wilder and sighed.

  “I’ll work with you, Cortez!” Ben volunteered. “We’ll come up with a counter-proposal together!”

  “Or Ben could design the bathroom in here,” Copeland countered. “The other watch-standers use their own heads. But ours is farther from the bridge.”

  They were still flipping tiles and 3D models after dinner. The most popular contest was who could design the most ghastly, hideous Kassidy bathroom. Eli won that round by making her entire bathroom the same pulsating orange as her bedroom cabinets, plus a lone baby blue tile awkwardly off-center above the john.

  Kassidy timidly displayed her concept art using the ditsy print floral. “I could paint custom tiles for other people, too,” she offered.

  Copeland reached over to delete her file. “Veto.” Sass and Abel backed him up.

  As people settled to watch a Dusk-night movie together, and Kassidy collected up her tiles and approved designs, Abel sidled up to her. “Good job. Fun evening.” Copeland smiled and tipped his beer bottle at her in salute as well.

  The scapegoating was over.

  “I get the most aggressively testosterone-colored bathroom the Alohan system has ever known,” Cortez added, snuggled into Wilder’s arm and sneering at her. Copeland’s ruby-and-stark-neutrals pattern had won. “Yeah. Great job, Kassidy.”

  Wilder and Copeland liked that. They half-rose and bopped fists across the table. Ben shot Cortez a sympathetic smile. His sincere rainbow-themed shower design won honorable mention for most ugly.

  Kassidy sighed. Well, she’d made progress anyway.

  Day 88 outbound from Mahina

  65 days to Denali

  Ben led a posse into the dining room, flanked by Cortez and Wilder. They stalked to Copeland. That day, as every day, the damned man studied his engineering and math texts.

  Ben gazed around. Safe. Abel and Jules, Sass and Clay were elsewhere.

  Wilder sank into the chair next to Cope. “You’ve been holding out on us, buddy.”

  The ex-mobster engineer barely deigned to glance up from his vexing trigonometry text. He pursed his lips and transcribed the next math problem onto another tablet for solving.

  “You know how to program the sex VR,” Cortez accused, leaning onto the table across from him. “Ben told us.”

  Ben entertained sudden misgivings as Copeland froze and fixed him with a gimlet gaze. If looks could kill. Granted, Ben realized, that had been only one aspect of an extremely personal conversation. “I didn’t tell them anything else,” he attempted to excuse himself.

  You’re dead to me, was how he’d translate Cope’s return sneer of disdain.

  Ben telegraphed back his own. Nobody’s secrets survive this voyage. Nobody. You thought you’d be immune? Still, Cope’s admission really had been rather…intimate.

  “Ben says there’s more to the game than just that porn city,” Wilder pressed.

  “Like there’s nice parts,” Cortez chimed in. “Roman baths? Sexy masseuses? And you can customize the whole thing?”

  Copeland told Ben that was his first job for the mob in Schuyler, working for the prostitution division when he was 15. They used the same game engine as on Mahina Orbital, but extended differently. They rented half hour or hour-long visits into the illegal VR on demand, usually for couples.

  Cope’s main point to Ben was that the whole experience disgusted him. He’d let slip that the clientele tended to make passes at the young John Copeland – or more than passes. Just now, Ben ardently hoped Cope didn’t believe he would have told anyone the rest of that. That would be a betrayal.

  Judging from Cope’s stone face, he was thinking along similar lines.

  “Your turn at sunset is coming up,” Wilder wheedled. “Next week.”

  Cortez added, “You always do some masterful engineer trick.”

  Indeed, Copeland’s last turn leading sunset was a beach party. He’d rigged external sunlight pipes for Eli’s plant experiments. For sunset, he brought a sun line into the cargo hold and set up a foamcrete splash pool under it. They played ankle-deep water volleyball. Kassidy recorded them playing to send to Nico. Everybody felt better for the vitamin D as their sun-starved skins soaked it up. Ben and Sass got cute sunburned noses, being the palest of the group. The general consensus was the splash party was the best sunset theme yet.

  That wholesome party was a far cry from what they were asking now.

  “The captain hates that damned porn VR as much as I do,” Copeland hissed.

  “But buddy,” Ben ventured, earning a sharp glare, “you said you could set up, you know, how aggressive the NPCs are.” The non-player characters in the sin city tended to accost players and toss them onto tables for sex. But Cope said he normally set them passive. The player had to actually ask them for favors, and got a menu of options. “I bet Sass would like Roman baths with an attractive masseuse.”

  “And if she wouldn’t, we would,” Wilder insisted.

  Cortez offered, “I could print all the headsets. If you teach me how.”

  “I hate you,” Copeland advised Ben.

  “Well…it’s not boring,” Ben offered weakly.

  And they all suffered from terminal boredom. Well, four of them did. Clay and Sass, Cope and Eli, Abel and Jules, seemed perfectly content with their pursuits. Damn them.

  14

  Day 101 outbound from Mahina

  52 days to Denali

  Copeland had to admit that the Roman baths were exquisite. Fluted marble colonnades marched to a vibrant bank of flowers, dropping off toward a distant view of Roman-era Tuscan hills, golden with ripe grass in the lowering sunset, and a pretty volcano shaped like Mount Fuji. Almond and olive groves, palms and bananas and kiwi graced the villa’s hilltop to left and right. Beyond the columns, the ancient equivalent of a bank of cabanas offered private draped nooks for massages.

  The main pool featured a fountain splashing two meters high and three across. Different sections offered a belly-button deep stone shelf to sit on, tepid water or cool or almost painfully hot. Statuesque bath slaves stood ready with fragrant cypress swatches and palm fronds to flap at the patrons on request to get their blood up.

  The slaves wore bikinis. Copeland explicitly parameterized this simulation for an R rating. Historical accuracy be damned. One of the pool corners was set up to resemble a Japanese onsen, and another a deep Russian bath. No one from Mahina knew the difference.

  He had to concede he wasn’t too embarrassed. He picked up a drink called a tequila sunset from a smiling buxom blonde slave. And he chose a spitting dolphin fountain to perch on to await his guests.

  The flavor was interesting. Whatever tequila was, the simulated beverage couldn’t give him a buzz.

  “Happy sunset!” he bade the first pair to arrive, Sass and Clay. He wished he looked as good in a bathing suit as they did. His shiny skimpy red brief didn’t really complement his tattoos.

  Sass eyed the bath slaves. “They will not touch?�
�

  “If you ask them to,” Copeland explained, “they’ll draw you into an alcove first. And everyone will go into an alcove for a massage. So no need to be embarrassed about it. Much. The alcoves are private instances.”

  “What?”

  “No one can follow you in. They have to enter with you at the start.”

  “I see. The attendants are very…scenic,” Sass allowed. “The whole thing. This is beautiful, Cope.”

  He frowned at the scenery, vines dangling a mix of tropical and temperate fruit, among brilliant flowers rich in perfume. “Did Earth really look like this?”

  “Not unless you were fabulously wealthy,” Clay breathed.

  Sass sighed. “Not even them by the end.”

  The others popped into existence and ooh’d and ah’d. Just slipping into a bath was a sybaritic experience. The ones who’d never sunk to using the VR marveled at the sensations, the smells, the tastes, how realistic the chiseled slaves were. And no guilt – the slaves were automatons carved of 1’s and 0’s, not people degraded by their service. The beautiful masseuses were no more self-aware than the hummingbirds or the fountain.

  “I could get used to this,” Eli summed up. “This is a far cry from seedy porn VR.”

  “You did good, Cope,” Jules assured him, savoring her fruit juice.

  Sunset-toasting accomplished, and his guests happily blotto, Cope summoned a beefy male and female masseuse combo and followed them to an alcove. He selected a female Nubian, delicate on top with generous hips and butt, who came paired with a beefy Germanic blond guy.

  “Can I join you?” Ben hopped out of the pool and slipped in beside him.