Interplanetary Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  “When you were a kid?” Abel asked.

  Sass grinned. “A few million years before my time. The atmosphere had a different gas mix then. Go on, Cope.”

  “So you get the idea. We need to get one of these cities – maybe Waterfalls, maybe one of the others – to agree to host us. And it’s a big ask. Another dome interested in taking over the high tech role Denali Prime used to fill.”

  “With some flat land nearby,” Ben elaborated. “Several don’t have that. Hell, one’s under the ocean.”

  Cope nodded. “Willing to have us as neighbors and extend their interdiction perimeter to include us, I hope.”

  “That’s an enormous economic commitment,” Abel acknowledged.

  Ben added, “And then we glass their landscape and make a big ugly on their doorstep.”

  Cope shrugged. On Mahina, one didn’t ordinarily think of people objecting when a swatch of regolith was claimed for industrial purposes. But land didn’t cost anything on Mahina. Unimproved moon dust and rocks were in ample supply.

  “And then we make friends and start figuring out how to make fuel,” he finished.

  “Any progress on that front?” Sass inquired.

  The engineer sighed. “We were looking at the cargo and landing first.”

  “Understood. I didn’t realize a simple place to park would be such an issue.”

  Clay said, “Question. If Denali Prime was making fuel, is there any chance there is still fuel there?”

  “We can’t see it from here,” Cope answered. “Maybe from orbit we’ll get a better idea. Or from talking to people on the ground. That would be…?”

  “I think Clay and I should take point on negotiations,” Sass replied. “With Abel ironing out the business details. How are we on supplies?”

  “We should back off to eating new protein stocks every other supper. And save the next recycling system flush for just before we enter atmo. Cap, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep our systems uncontaminated down there. Gossamer stayed in orbit. My understanding is that the domes can’t keep out the bakkra. Just limit which bakkra and how much of them.”

  Ben added, “It lives on people. In your nose, ears, lungs, gut, everywhere. There’s no way to completely clean it off. So they live with it.”

  “But people do live here,” Abel argued. “It can’t be that bad. The settlers probably thought they got the best real estate in the whole Aloha system.”

  Ben grumbled, “People live on Sagamore, too.” Aside from 1/7th g gravity, the Saggies didn’t appear to wring much benefit from their cold and airless moon.

  “Hopefully nicer people than Sagamore,” Abel conceded.

  “And you can’t even hum a few bars about the fuel yet,” Sass mused.

  Copeland sighed. “We need to rebuild a space age technology, starting from…what, exactly? Ben and I talked to Hell’s Bells, how they do it. And a little with Mahina. But what industrial base do I have to work with on Denali? Unknown.”

  Sass nodded and made a note of it. “I’ll find you the right people to talk to, when the lag is less cumbersome. But job one is clearly to arrange for a nice, smooth, uneventful landing. And a warm welcome. Somewhere.”

  27

  Day 155 outbound from Mahina

  8 days to Denali

  Kassidy practically vibrated with anticipation. At last, Sass had reached her dad on Denali! The whole crew piled into the galley to listen in on her long-awaited first reunion. Well, Cortez was stuck in the auto-doc from a setback, but no doubt Wilder would pipe the audio down for her to listen in as well.

  She had so much she wanted to tell her dad! Her broadcasting empire on Mahina. Her following of tens of thousands. Her mission to uplift everyone to dream and aspire. Her new screenwriting project, an historical fiction epic of the settlement of Mahina, interleaving heroic stories from the Gannies, Mahina Actual terraformers, and the refugee settlers.

  She could skip the part about her currently mopping floors for a living. Actually she could make it sound romantic, working her way on a tramp ship across the deep to explore new worlds. And she’d come to save her dad and bring him home!

  “Alright, Kassidy,” Sass interrupted her thoughts. “Just patching him in now.” She clicked on the speaker.

  “– Next voice will be Michael Yang.”

  Kassidy hugged herself in glee.

  A squeaky voice emitted from the speaker. Kassidy spent much of her time editing video. It sounded like the squeal of audio playing too fast. Except the words were about the usual length.

  Sass’s eyes widened. “Helium!”

  “Huh?”

  Sass leaned forward to speak first. “Dr. Michael Yang? This is Captain Sass Collier of the Thrive. From Mahina. We’re arriving on Denali in about a week. And I have a very special passenger on board.” She grinned at Kassidy.

  “Good to hear from you, Captain Collier!”

  That voice was not Kassidy’s dad. That squeak was a cartoon chipmunk. Kassidy scrunched her face up and looked a question at Sass, What the hell?

  Sass waved a rotating hand for her to go on.

  “Hi, Daddy? It’s Kassidy!”

  “Who?”

  “Your daughter. Kassidy Yang!”

  After a long pause, the affronted chipmunk said, “Captain Collier, if this is a joke, it is in very poor taste.”

  “Daddy, it’s not a joke. It’s really me, Kassidy.” She meant to say it was good to hear his voice again. But it wasn’t her father’s voice. Why so squeaky?

  The high-pitched scientist objected, “My daughter Kassidy is a student at Mahina University now. Or she’d damned well better be. She’s too young to have finished her medical training yet.”

  “Daddy, I finished my bachelor’s degree,” Kassidy argued. “Then I launched a broadcast empire. I can’t wait to show you my programs! When we have video.”

  “You dropped out of college? To cross space in one of those death trap rust buckets?”

  “I love working on the Thrive, Daddy. And I’ve seen the orbital, Hell’s Bells, Sagamore, and Denali, soon!”

  “So have I,” Dr. Yang retorted. “Can’t say I’d recommend it.”

  Kassidy deflated. Daddy was sounding an awful lot like Mom, the indomitable Dr. Paripati. “But I can’t wait to see you!”

  “You say that now,” Yang argued. “I don’t think you’d like it here at all.”

  Screw you, too, Dad, were the words that came to mind.

  Fortunately Sass decided to step in. “Dr. Yang? We’re having some trouble understanding you. Are you in a helium atmosphere?”

  “Yes, Neptune dome is helium. That’s necessary to – never mind, it’s complicated.”

  “I’m eager to understand,” Sass assured him.

  Kassidy would rather the man cared about his only daughter, come to see him from a bazillion miles away. But she had to admit, she was curious why her super-genius dad sounded like an idiot chipmunk.

  “Neptune dome is on the sea floor,” Dr. Yang explained. “The air pressure needs to be very high down here. So they replace nitrogen with helium in our air mix. Otherwise we’d get nitrogen poisoning, basically. The oxygen proportion is low, too. Can’t even light a match down here.”

  Their own scientist Eli looked enlightened, and nodded. Apparently he thought this was clever.

  Kassidy didn’t. “Daddy, why do you want to live on the sea floor?”

  “I came down here to investigate a Ganymede ship. I stayed because it’s cooler down here. Denali is awfully hot. You’ll see.”

  Clay and Sass leaned forward hungrily, as though about to devour the speaker. “You found Belker’s ship?” Sass demanded.

  “What do you know about Belker?”

  “I was his guinea pig about 70 years ago.”

  “One of those! Yes, Captain Collier, I’m very eager to meet with you. Um, you too, Kassidy.”

  “Gee thanks, Dad,” Kassidy retorted. She couldn’t help it.

  “You stil
l look like your mother?” he squeaked.

  Kassidy sighed. “I’m prettier than she is.”

  “That wouldn’t take much. I look forward to seeing you. Yang out.”

  Kassidy stared at the speaker. “That’s it?”

  Sass explained apologetically, “They only have part-time communications with the sea floor habitat. We needed to schedule this. But we’ll talk to him after we land.”

  “Belker’s ship!” Clay marveled. “Yang just moved to the top of our to-do list.”

  Sass differed. “Landing and settling in at Waterfalls is top of our list. Then maybe.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ben admitted.

  “Belker was the genius who injected Clay and me with the nanites that keep us looking this young,” Sass reminded him.

  “And bringing us back from the dead,” Clay added.

  “Point is, Ben,” Sass resumed, “he came back, from outside the Alohan system. No one else has heard from the other colonies since the settlers arrived here and the Gannies left.”

  Copeland murmured, “Because the Gannies left us without a warp-capable ship.”

  “Well,” Kassidy said practically, “if it’s on the sea floor, its warp days are over. Probably. Eli, I don’t get it. Why did he sound like that?”

  “Oh. You understand how air pressure gets lower when you’re at higher altitude, right?”

  “Sure.” Kassidy first met the Thrive to hire them for daredevil stunts, sky diving to the surface of Mahina.

  “The same idea applies in water. The water pressure is such-and-such at the surface. Much higher pressure than air. And it gets stronger fast as you go down. By the time you reach, say, 50 meters deep, it’s crushing. Anyway, that means that people at those depths have to breathe higher pressure air than normal. More gas molecules in every cubic centimeter of air. But you can’t just concentrate our normal air mix. Oxygen and nitrogen are poisonous at those levels. So they replaced some of those with an inert gas. Helium.”

  Sass clarified, “When you breathe helium, your voice gets squeaky. Do they have helium balloons at Mahina Actual?” That last question she aimed at Clay.

  He shrugged. “Never noticed. Don’t think so.”

  Kassidy scowled. “This was like a commonly known thing on Earth?”

  “Helium balloons, sure,” Sass agreed. “Living on the ocean floor, not so much.”

  Clay shook his head. “You won’t like visiting your dad. Maybe he could come up to meet us?” he suggested to Sass.

  “And tote a Ganymede warp ship along with him?” Sass returned. “I want to see the ship. Clay, what if it still has a warp lens?”

  “Hm, there’s that,” Clay agreed.

  “Copeland, you should probably see the ship, too,” Sass encouraged. “And maybe they use a sky drive for power down there.”

  Copeland’s look was of one of horror.

  Ben answered for him: “No.”

  To Kassidy, the Ganymede relic was a side issue, likewise Cope and Ben’s phobia collection. “Why won’t I like visiting an undersea dome? That sounds epic!”

  Sass and Clay settled in to explain scuba diving and the bends to her, and just how dark an ocean floor could be. The fact that it was polar night would hardly brighten things up. Neptune was only slightly south of the other Denali settlements.

  The rest of the crew dispersed, often touching her for encouragement on the way out.

  Day 162 outbound from Mahina

  1 day to Denali

  Ben sat dangling his pressure-suited feet beside Copeland. They perched on top of their odd container, the 5th box and sole surviving member of the second layer. The immense arc of Denali stretched above, below, and to both sides.

  His companions were out here to launch a satellite. He came along to help say good-bye, just in case.

  Cope was busy with a joystick, like flying a drone. He steered the last of the satellites into position. Abel already managed to sell all the ones they brought from the Saggies, except this one they held for themselves. Copeland studied the available tech and chose it for its superior bandwidth. He goosed up its batteries and extended its solar sails to recharge them. With luck the little orbiting machine might survive a couple decades before requiring a replacement, providing up to 10 channels of crystal-clear video and data back to Pono all the while.

  No one on the planet below had the power to service it. Their last skyships were gone. A year ago, Ben had never pictured himself going into space. Now he could scarcely imagine being stuck in a gravity well forever. Though he might be soon.

  “So Sass, up is the north pole?” Ben asked. The planet’s top, relative to where they perched upside-down below the bottom of the ship, loomed dark above the colorful chaos before them.

  Most of the planet was covered in oceans, much like Earth, though only about 60% to Earth’s 75% – Ben had looked that up. But what was ocean or land wasn’t obvious from this vantage point. The planet’s surface seemed mostly blue and dark green near the dark pole. Further south were large stretches of tans. Small patches of purple and red swam in the blue zones. The whole was swathed in cottony strands of white and pink and pale yellow. Off to the right, some of the clouds curled to form an arc of circles.

  Sass had wandered to the far end of the container, standing for maximum view. Ben preferred his seat, unable to persuade his inner ears he wasn’t falling when he stood up. “Correct,” she agreed. “This satellite’s orbit will zig-zag from arctic to antarctic, across the the equator. The mid-line. Directly in front of us is the temperate… Well, there’s nothing temperate about it. Intermediate, anyway, between equator and pole.”

  “Why zig-zag?”

  “Because all the Denalis live at the pole. But Pono is on the ecliptic. Sort of on a plane with the equator. Though the planet wobbles. Anyway, we can talk to Pono best from the equator.”

  Cope chimed in, “I hope we can talk to Pono from all latitudes. Except when the planet is in the way. That’ll be half the time. Like Mahina Orbital. We’ll have good line of sight to Pono for about 30 minutes, then wait 60 for it to come around again.”

  “OK. What are the red splotches?” Ben asked.

  “Like a little kid with the questions,” Copeland teased.

  Ben grinned at him through his helmet.

  Sass replied, “Good question. Hard to tell. On Earth we had ‘red tides,’ where the algae…single-cell plants. Some were blue-green, some red. Anyway, where they grew out of control, there were red areas you could see even from space. I’m guessing the purple and red are something like that. The tan areas are deserts. Too hot for plants.”

  “And the cloud circles, those are storms?”

  “Yeah. We have those even on Pono. But on Pono they last months, even years. Here they’re moving. Looks like a line of cyclones – circle storms, coming from the right there.”

  She explained hurricanes to him as Copeland finished his positioning. Conversation lapsed as he moved on to signal tests, talking in real time to the Denalis at Waterfalls, and sending to Mahinans at Schuyler and Mahina Actual and the orbital, and the Sagamores at Hell’s Bells and their orbital.

  Ben could barely imagine rain, let alone slashing winds uprooting trees and smashing houses. It sounded terrifying, and exhilarating.

  There would be rain on Denali, like a wild shower from the sky. The planet below was untamed, plants never planted, animals fed by no one but themselves. Humans were an afterthought, a tiny foothold nothing else cared about. How utterly different from the worlds he’d visited, where all life sprang from people.

  Copeland folded a leg around to face Ben, and tapped him to do likewise. “How’s the video quality, Schuyler?” he asked with a grin.

  “Ben, your camera is broadcasting,” Copeland prompted. “Show them around.” They both wore Kassidy’s camera dots on their face plates.

  Ben panned his helmet slowly, from his room-mate’s helmet, across and over the arc of Denali. “Our lovely Captain Sass,” he murmured
as she entered the frame and waved. Then he stretched sideways to show the container stack and the side of the Thrive from underneath. “Can anyone spot Pono?”

  “Behind the ship,” Sass explained.

  “Oh, well. Schuyler, test complete, Thrive out,” Copeland said.

  Ben turned back forward. “Do I need to repeat that for all of them?”

  “No, I recorded it,” Cope replied. “I just sent the clip to the rest. They’ll acknowledge eventually. Our time lag is up to 11 minutes now.”

  Pono raced ahead on its swing around the sun. Though they’d halted at Denali orbit, they still grew farther from home with each passing hour, and would for months. Eventually they’d reach 30 minutes lag time. For a while the sun would eclipse communications completely, but probably no longer than Pono itself stood in the way between Mahina and Denali.

  Cope poked him. “Ready for Dad?”

  Ben turned back to face him slowly. “Hi, Dad, I’m at Denali!”

  Cope nodded. “Hi, Nico, we’re at Denali. We’re outside the ship now. Tomorrow we fly down there.”

  Ben turned to point his camera at the planet. “We’re so far away that even a picture of us takes 11 minutes to reach you.” He shifted his face plate back toward Cope.

  “We wanted to say hi, just in case,” Cope said softly. “But I’ll call you again from the big planet. Where the wild things live!”

  “Gotta admit, Dad,” Ben returned. “I’m a little scared. But really excited!”

  “In case anything happens to us,” Cope added. “Know that we love you.”

  “Always,” Ben confirmed. He waved his gauntleted hand.

  “And that’s enough of that,” the engineer declared. “Sass, you want to send a video postcard with the pretty planet?”

  Sass chuckled. “No, thank you. I’ll let Kassidy do that for us.”

  They headed in to let Abel and Kassidy take their turn putting on a scenic show for the folks back home, rich in EVA acrobatics.

  By the time the first acknowledgments came rolling in, Ben was sitting on the bridge. Dad’s video clip arrived soon after the stations. Tears stood in his eyes, which pricked answering tears in Ben’s own.