Thrive rayas dreaming th.., p.1
Thrive Rayas Dreaming (Thrive Colony Corps Space Adventures Book 4), page 1
THRIVE RAYAS DREAMING
THRIVE COLONY CORPS SPACE ADVENTURES BOOK 4
GINGER BOOTH
Copyright © 2022 Ginger Booth
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Raphael Francavilla
Skyship image © Freestyleimages | Dreamstime.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
CONTENTS
Diagram
Prologue
Prelude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Afterword
Reader Group
Also by Ginger Booth
Acknowledgments
Merchant Thrive
Additional research staff are on the courier Psyche, under Captain Zan.
PROLOGUE
The resurrected Colony Corps
visits Rayas,
furthest-flung colony of the Diaspora.
Rayas promises ansibles,
and the Dream,
virtual reality software to accelerate
technical education.
PRELUDE
Platystemon tipped her head back, to marvel at the top of a redwood in the magical forest. The Dream’s virtual reality had never before seemed so vivid, so…dreamy.
She reached out her arms to encompass her world. Not simply MAD-C, the hodgepodge space orbital hanging above planet Rayas, but Artemis City on Luna, where she’d lived the past few years, and all the lonely light years in between. As her thoughts touched any one thing, she fell outward from there to infinity.
The golden glowing motes grew thicker, wafting in the forest around her like fireflies, or pixies. Their floral scent reminded her of roses on Luna, or the pinkish bacterial mats near the creche playground when she was a child. She reached out in wonder to catch one in her hand. It popped like a soap bubble.
Suddenly she was no longer in the forest, but laying in the Santa Barbara, the ship that carried her to Luna. After the agony of childbirth, brownish blood smears everywhere, she held her miraculous tiny baby in her arms. And her face burned with shame. She cringed from her boyfriend Dill Brisbane’s gaze.
The child wasn’t his.
The glowing orbs clustered closer, and Dill’s eyes flew wide. He extended a tentative finger to touch the mesmerizing curled fingers of the infant, with their minuscule fingernails. “He’s a miracle. Perfect!”
Getting pregnant, having a baby accidentally in space, shouldn’t have been possible. All the babies on all the colony worlds were conceived and gestated in vitro. The rare pregnancies miscarried, nature’s abortion of a nonviable fetus. But her baby was perfect.
Aside from having the wrong dad.
“I’m so sorry, Dill!” she sobbed. “It didn’t mean anything! I just –”
Dill paid no attention to her upset, enraptured with the infant. His face glowed almost as warmly as the floating fairy lights. “We have a son. Can I hold him?”
She lightly swung her legs off the gurney to sit up. Her body felt strong and agile, not a trace of the wear and tear of childbirth. Dill sat beside her and took the child with infinite gentleness. His big hand encompassed the baby’s head on his palm, but his touch was gentle, deft, delighted.
He wouldn’t be delighted when he knew. “Zombat is the father.”
Dill laughed and shot her a look of absolute love. “More than one man can love a baby, Platy. He’s mine too. Isn’t he? Because you’re mine. You’ll see. It’s all good.”
“You forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Dill said lightly, as though her concern didn’t matter in the slightest. His eyes drank in Warp again, entranced, their son. “You discovered something we never knew. A natural one g pregnancy can succeed in a spaceship.”
She huffed a laugh. Leave it to the engineer to find the mechanics the interesting part. “I don’t recommend it.”
Yet even as she said it, she realized it wasn’t true. The discomfort of this new person growing within, the fear and worry, the agony of labor, the smell of his newborn head, this experience bonded her to Warp in a way that decanting a mechanized gestation chamber never could.
And now with the baby cuddled in her arms again, the shame vanished. She set him on the floor, now a rambunctious five-year-old. Warp eagerly tried to trap fireflies in his hands, but they flew through his skin.
I created a boy. And Dill loves us both.
“Platy!” The Dreamer Gabe’s voice broke into her reverie, now suddenly back amongst the towering redwoods. Warp’s giggles faded into the distance. “You promised not to come here alone.”
“Whyever not?” She drank in the redwoods in rapture, the glowing motes now friends she wanted to visit with. She reached out again and Gabe’s big hand caught her own.
“Come away, daughter.” Gabe’s endearing St. Bernard features appeared younger than her own.
Yet he was her father. He wasn’t ashamed of her. Though her mother remained adamantly ashamed of him. Is that where I learned shame for Warp.
“I want to stay. There’s so much more to learn.”
But the redwoods vanished. They stood now in the Dream’s classroom, one of the science labs Platy dreaded. Learning pole dancing was easy, joy made motion. Mastering the math, physics, and chemistry of terraforming had been torture. She failed spectacularly in the only industry of Rayas – converting the icky microbial mats to an Earth-like biosphere. Disgraced, her mom sent her away to Luna as the ship’s steward, good for nothing but housekeeping, never to return while her mom still lived. Sorry, Mom, got back a couple decades early.
“Platy, this is important,” Gabe said earnestly. “Don’t come looking for trouble. Are you listening?”
Gabe sat on a rock in the redwood forest, glaring at the pixies, when Zombat inevitably arrived to bitch at him. To him the forest smelled of a quick cool rain squall in the burning dust of Guadalajara.
Zombat recounted how the creche called him to complain that his ‘wife’ picked up their child stoned on Dream psychotropics. She disrupted after-school pickup by hugging Warp, tears running down her face. The matron in charge ordered her to stop, because the other kids didn’t get hugs like that. They all stared at her. At which point Platy ‘accosted’ several other children – hugged them too – and told them to hug each other, until the matron kicked her out of the play court.
Then she’d run straight to Dill. Who was at work in his father’s engineering lab, a space most emphatically off-limits to five-year-olds. Zombat wasn’t sure exactly how the rest went down. But Dill hadn’t told granddad Brisbane that Warp wasn’t his biological son. And Platy somehow thought Dill forgave her for shacking up with Zombat.
No.
Zombat growled, “You should have explained to her that the visions aren’t real.”
Gabe huffed a laugh. “¡Güey! Why didn’t I think of that?” He swatted a pixie floater that passed through his hand. The two guys sat here once until they could tell each other’s demons apart.
“They’ll be here in days,” Zombat worried. “The ‘Colony Corps reborn.’ This is the wrong play, Gabe. We should be upfront with them. Tell them everything wrong with the Dream, then tell them everything right about it. They’re…engineer types. Like Dill. They like the bad news first.”
“You might be right,” Gabe allowed. “But what if we scare them off? We have nothing else. Do you want to be stuck here forever? I want to visit Aloha. I want our colony to migrate to Aloha, not just the Dream. I want Platy and Warp –” He stopped and bit his lip.
“It’s bad enough to share Warp with Dill. Don’t start with me, Gabe!”
“No, I want better for Platy. I don’t mean you, or Dill. A world that’s better for her. Because I think my daughter’s awesome. It’s just this slime pit of a planet.”
“It’s coming along.” Zombat’s voice lowered though, and he looked away.
“Truly,” Gabe agreed. “The lilac mats are now big enough to see from space. Used
to be, you couldn’t see them until they were close enough to kill you. How long, Paul? A century? A millennium? My baby girl’s whole life. Maybe my grandson’s as well.”
And he’d still be stuck in here, sentenced to the Dream. He’d be on parole when the Alohans arrived, allowed out. That reminded him. “Hey, can you give me a tour of MAD-C? And the mat tracks? Or are you planning to tell them I’m a political prisoner?”
Paul Kozak – Zombat on their game leader board long ago – sank to the rock beside his old rival in surrender. “We say as little as possible about Rayan politics.”
“You’ve got it backwards, my friend,” Gabe suggested. “People are people. They disagree, they choose sides, and politics get ugly. But El Soñador, that’s unique, ours. And it can really mess with your head.”
“Point.”
1
Nowadays we can scarcely imagine Mahina without its Day of the Dead. But actually this late import spread from the Colony Corps Academy, founded in 2220, a century after Mahina terraforming began.
– Quasar Shibuya, The Early Diaspora.
The particolored surface of Rayas flashed past in a blur as they came down for a landing. Sass Collier stood transfixed at the foot of the dining table on Merchant Thrive, wishing she were on the bridge, making this historic landing on a new colony world.
Merchant was Ben Acosta’s Colony Corps flagship. His first mate Judge Frampton piloted today, or possibly Ben himself. Unlike her ill-fated hubris on arrival at Earth last year, she didn’t even rate knowing who was at the con. She owned and led the original Thrive for over a dozen years. But now she was captain of nothing, a beggar in space.
She needed to prove herself on this mission if she ever wanted to helm another ship.
“Collier, plonk your ass down.” That was Ben’s husband Cope, at the head of the table, CEO of Thrive Spaceways Inc., ranking member of the off-duty oglers in the galley. “You’re blocking the view.”
Sass grimaced apology to the group, and moved her seat sideways to keep her head out of their view. But her embarrassment quickly fled in the wonder of the half-wall image before her. Merchant sliced into cloud cover now half the time, towering puffy mountains of dusky violet, streaming yellow and orange fire from the heat of their passage. Lightning forked green in the distance.
Then they exploded out of the cloud over mauve ocean under the rose sky. The Rayas microbial mats didn’t seem to float as islands on this sea. But in a trice they were over colored ground again as the ship continued braking. Or perhaps these were floating ecosystems, she couldn’t tell. Soon they flew through the sunset, flaming green against a rosy-purple backdrop, and the planet blackened beneath them.
No, something glimmered below, then outright glowed, a white tinted faintly with cyan.
“Interesting,” their physicist Teke noted, bald with golden skin, as all Denali. “Why would a microbial ecosystem invest energy in bioluminescence?”
“I defer to Eli,” John Copeland replied, lanky from Mahina gravity stretch. Eli Rasmussen’s team of terraforming experts rode their other ship, Psyche. Sass bet they were gabbing a mile a minute. Merchant carried the engineering geeks. “But the locals might be burning at landscape level.”
The ship flew backwards, the rear engines braking. This fire died away by the time they caught up to sunrise, the crazy quilt ground quickly emerging from the murk, its colors ever more vivid. They’d bled off speed, with not a jounce or bobble on the way down. Now they slowly flipped end for end, the view slowly swooning before them, but any gravity effects canceled by their inertial dampeners. There was an art to doing this so smoothly that no one suffered tummy distress, not even from the view.
Ben piloted the ship, Sass concluded ruefully. She taught him to fly once. He’d long since left her in the dust.
From here, they flew in ‘airplane mode’ as she thought of it, though Merchant’s stubby wing fins added no lift. They dove into a towering thunderstorm, with more of the disturbing green lightning. Sass tensed, breathing shallowly, as though her own hands were on the helm. A brief nimbus of green fire told her they had indeed caught an electric bolt. But the shields held steady, and the conn. And they emerged safely through rainbows, far lower than they’d entered. From this altitude, she could appreciate the size of enormous ragged mountains shielding a subtropical valley from harsher weather to the north.
Huh, like the tree-lines of Earth, the gaudy mats ended partway up the mountains. Snow-caps showed peachy. And that sulfurous golden river was probably an actual river, draining the range. A glint beside it drew her attention to the surface toe-hold, the settlement. Or perhaps the surface labs. Most of the Rayans still lived in orbit at this stage of taming the planet. Rayas was youngest by far of the Diaspora colonies.
Ben’s voice came over the ship address. “Away party to the hold. Prep for landing.”
“Alcaldesa Hess.” Ben Acosta greeted the eldest of the waiting trio of women first, holding out his pressure suit gauntlet to offer a handshake. He’d met the other two before.
“What the hell is that on your shoulder?” the elderly barracuda returned, her accented English closer to Denali than Mahina. She and her companions wore hazmat suits, air pressure not being the environmental challenge here. Rayas offered plenty of air, but none of it safe to breathe.
Ben introduced his translator for the day, the digitally sapient mink Fidget, followed by the other members of his away team. Alone of his party, Fidget wore no space suit.
“Call me Principal.” That was accented in Spanish. “Or just Shady. Everyone else does. Why are you here instead of MAD-C?”
Mayor Shady Hess wasn’t one for niceties, a jarring trait in the leader of a frontier town. Taken aback, Ben replied, “You’re a colony world. This is your colony.”
“Yes, yes. But the population is in orbit. Surely they explained that!”
The lead botanist Eli Rasmussen murmured in his ear, off-speaker on comms. “Ben, I think she’s the principal investigator. Not the mayor.” Like everyone on the Thrive team, Eli appeared 25, gawkier than most, but was likely older than Hess.
Ben’s understanding of the social milieu took a radical veer, and he nodded subtle thanks to Eli. “My terraforming team wishes to understand what you’re up against. We’re from a colony world ourselves. We understand how challenging your planet appears.”
“Then why are you talking instead of him?” Shady demanded, pointing to Eli.
Bitch. Ben smiled and bowed for Eli to address his peer from another world.
“I’m Dr. Eli Rasmussen of Mahina University, landscape botany. My associate Zelda specializes in atmospherics, and Porter in agronomy – substrates. This is our,” he paused to make a show of counting, “seventh world. Omitting space platforms and cold airless moons, of course. Lacking from the terraforming perspective.”
Ben tuned them out while they played academic one-upmanship. He turned instead to the two women he’d met on Luna, both on the later edge of middle age. “Dr. Zephyr, Lupe, good to see you again. Medicine must be a real challenge.”
“Not really,” Zephyr cut him off. “But you need to watch for the color of our hazmat suits.” Her garb was a particularly ugly shade of blue-purple. “If you see any on the landscape, it’s probably too late for you. But contact me immediately.”
