Ringship prosper thrive.., p.11
Ringship Prosper (Thrive Space Colony Adventures Book 5), page 11
“Right.” Pollan set his traveling observation bubble moving again. Only a few meters farther, it lurched to another ‘vertical’ track and sank toward the rock again. “There’s no corridor access to my private office.”
“We have a shuttle,” Cope pointed out. “Pressure suits.” He let out a huge sigh of relief as the view blinked out, surrounded by a rock shaft again. This one was shallower. The elevator halted at minimum depth for the rock, 6 meters under. Sheepishly, he let go Ben’s hand. Ben missed his touch.
“Well, a shuttle would be conspicuous,” Pollan muttered, and opened the door. Ben’s ears popped. “Welcome to my lair.”
Pollan wasn’t the luxury type. If anything, his hideaway was even more Spartan than the ‘public’ hideaway where they found him. Although the reception area by the elevator was dominated by a wall of scrubber trees. Ben could tell by the clean smell, slightly citrus and olive. These trees must have grown from cuttings from Thrive’s two trees years ago, wide and space-filling with no particular inclination to stretch ‘up’ in zero g, strongly lit from all sides.
Pollan led them into his office. “All these people?” he asked Cope dubiously. The Spaceways president shrugged in resignation and perched his rump on the man’s desk. Hunter and Zan claimed the steel-framed love seat. Ben and Teke took the hard plastic visitor chairs in front of the desk. They didn’t remain seated long.
Pollan transferred a basket of fruit to the floor, then brought up a picture on his desktop. “A mining skiff out of MO spotted the item, next ring band inward from ours. No reason for anyone to go there.” This first picture was murky. A couple skiff lights illuminated parts of a geodesic ball in space, with maybe 60 triangular faces of dull metal with a few markings, protuberances, and impact scars.
He set the image in motion, presumably video from the skiff approaching. An audio track supplied the typical banter of ignorant workmen. Pollan muted the sound.
After a couple seconds watching, Ben paused the frame and pointed. “Hell, that’s from Sanctuary!”
Teke and Cope nodded, unsurprised. Pollan noted, “We figured that part out ourselves, Ben. Seems to be a cache.”
Cope murmured, “Nanomage must have left it here before Belker headed for Denali.”
Hunter peered over Teke’s shoulder. “Not Ganymede? From when the Vitality delivered the settlers?”
“Sanctuary was settled after they left here,” Ben explained. “That logo is Sanctuary. Nanomage is the only ship we know of that visited Aloha after the Ganymede crews left. What’s that, 80 years ago now?”
“Something like that,” Cope agreed. “And Belker came back 30 years ago. Could have been another secret visit from Sanctuary, but KISS.”
“Kiss?” Hunter inquired.
“Keep it simple, stupid,” Pollan volunteered. “So this thing was 16 meters in diameter, masquerading as a rock in a sea of rocks. No EM signature most of the time. The miners caught some kind of heartbeat broadcast, fraction of a second, repeated less than once a day. And they brought it in. And the bidding began.”
“This was seven months ago?” Cope confirmed. “Where is it now?”
“God knows,” Pollan sighed. “Cope, I warned you. The bidding was fast and furious. I lost it to the captain after a couple weeks. He sold it to Hell’s Bells for a ton of favors. Last I heard someone stole it from Hell’s Bells and sold it on Sagamore to set himself up, rich for life. Or to fund a revolution, you never know with the Saggies.”
“Rego hell!” Cope growled. “You didn’t open the box?”
“’Course I opened the box!” Pollan scoffed. “Just showing you the outside first. You could have had it all if you’d just come running. I told you first! You got your boy in orbit all the time!”
Ben glowered at him for the dig.
“Didn’t have that kind of capital lying around,” Cope complained.
“Excuse me,” Hunter interrupted. “Why isn’t this in the hands of the Mahina government?”
Pollan harrumphed. “What Mahina government. Not like they could pay us anything worth squat in the rings.”
Cope was busy studying the outside of the cache, so Ben volunteered. “Hunter, what’s valuable up here in orbit is the tools to power expansion, life support, propulsion. Hell’s Bells is way ahead of Mahina Orbital in space station tech. Star drives, fuel, asteroid smelters, mining skiffs, guns, you name it. This find is gold. MO is desperate for anything they can trade with the hellbellies. There is no inter-world currency out here. Just favors, technology, prizes.”
“But this find belongs to the people of Mahina,” Hunter claimed.
“That’s one viewpoint,” Ben allowed. “Not shared by those who found it. Probably not by those who put it here, either. Hunter, it’s space tech. Spacers figure it’s ours because we have use for it. Rego-humpers don’t.”
Cope chuckled softly at Ben claiming allegiance to the spacers instead of his birth world. To Ben it was simple truth.
“Show me what was inside,” Cope requested. “Or wait, was it interesting to open?”
“Not especially,” Pollan replied. “Just large, but nothing a skiff couldn’t manage.” He selected another video to play, of a p-suited team opening the thing in a hangar, the kind of vast space they used for chopping stony and metallic asteroids, S-type and M-type, to feed the smelters. That might have been any of several buildings they’d trundled past in the glass elevator. Pollan cut that video when they opened the cache’s hexagonal hatch.
“Here’s the contents.” The desk filled with an array of images of items of unlike size. Several of them were obvious. He named them and flicked them off the visual to save space. “Food. Water, nothing special. Spare p-suits and air tanks, no better than our stuff. Now we’ve got the toys.”
Cope touched his hand before Pollan could casually flick away the toolbox. “You kept that. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
The two seasoned space engineers stared each other down. Pollan flinched first. “Might have done.”
Cope grinned. “You dog.”
“Not for sale,” Pollan replied repressively. “Besides, I seen what you played with from Nanomage. Nothing you ain’t seen before.”
Pollan had seen video recordings of Nanomage, Ben quibbled in silence. That wasn’t the same as pulling panels and rewiring the real deal, as he and Cope did on Denali.
“Nothing new?” Cope crooned. “I bet something.”
“Yeah, alright, maybe something. But that’s not what you’re here for, is it?”
“No,” Cope sighed. He selected three peculiar items to zoom in on. He and Teke studied one of them intently.
Rather than bang heads with them, Ben studied a third item on the other end of the table, rotating it to face him. Then he rolled it 90 degrees a couple times. The boxy device looked like the warp drive they found in Nanomage, the one Sass used to take the Thrive to Sanctuary. Or so they hoped. No one had heard from Sass since she engaged the warp, nor would they. If all transpired according to plan, she emerged from warp over a year ago objective, and was only now approaching the Colony Corps bolt-hole world of Sanctuary.
“Cope?” he murmured.
“I see it,” Cope agreed. “Just a toaster oven.”
“Hah!” Pollan scoffed. “That there’s a spare warp lens, and you know it. The only one in the system. You don’t have a prayer of getting it, either. Hell’s Bells won’t give it up.”
Cope shrugged. Can’t blame a guy for trying. He assigned the middle picture for Ben to investigate, and returned to studying the third artifact with Teke.
16
His assigned item to study had Ben floored at first. Not a standalone unit, the shape of the device’s protuberances reminded him of the heart, including stumps for the aorta and other blood vessels branching out to the lungs. No, this was meant to hook into the guts of… He mirrored the item, then flipped it upside down. “Pollan, any more pictures of this?”
“Double-tap it. Got a hundred pictures apiece on the interesting ones.”
Ben required exactly one more image to nail his identification, though he sifted through 20 to find that perfect angle. Yeah, he knew what this was. He paused, but realized Cope wouldn’t want him to say. Unlike the warp lens, this bit of Nanomage was never heralded on the news. Ben wasn’t even sure Cope saw it. So he continued perusing its images – maybe 40, not 100.
Beside him, Cope and Teke fixated on a new picture, their same boxy device with fold-out antlers extended. The black moose-box, as Ben mentally dubbed it, had a peculiar pewter sheen to it, almost oily. Teke played a video which slowly panned around the antlers, and zoomed in. He replayed the same half-second about a dozen times, then stood back with a sigh.
“These three items went to Hell’s Bells?” Cope confirmed. “Do you know for a fact which ones went down to Sagamore?”
“Like I said, the hellbellies are keeping that warp lens,” Pollan supplied. “The other two went walkies, the way I heard it. So give. What are they?”
“Give over the images first,” Cope demanded. “We had a deal.”
“You haven’t delivered yet,” Pollan argued. “One for a down payment, maybe.”
Cope narrowed his eyes. “I got two containers full of protein stock. Plus an iceberg big enough to irrigate a town and crack air besides. My deal didn’t include provisions. How many more paddies do you think that’s worth?” Rather than press the deal to a close, he backed off. “Show me this toolbox.”
Pollan didn’t take much coaxing. Deep down he must have longed to show off his prize to people who’d properly envy him. He pressed a release button to open a secret closet posing as a back wall. He caught it with his hand before it opened fully, so they wouldn’t see what else he had squirreled away back there. And he reached in to produce a sturdy fiberglass toolbox, its elderly handle lovingly duct-taped for that custom comfort grip.
He placed it on the table and lurked behind its lid a few moments to rearrange things. Ben and Teke leaned forward to peek, Cope sidling around the desk, a hand on Ben’s shoulder. Pollan lowered the lid to glare at Cope. “Do you mind? Back off.”
Ben and Cope withdrew. But Pollan didn’t glance Teke’s way. The physicist remained still, his eyes fixed for when Pandora’s box reopened. Ben observed this with peripheral vision.
People underestimated Teke. Less stocky than his fellow Denali, he finished growing at 1 g instead of his native 1.1 g. He was a harmless academic, right? Except Teke trained with hunters for fun, as well as cosmopolitans and his fellow academics. He spent his creche years in an agricultural dome like all Denali children. Pan-curious and super-genius, the younger man was a jack of all trades, and master of one.
Pollan opened the box again to rummage and hide his favorite treasures. Ben was sure Teke got a good look. Then the old chief turned the container to display the tools proudly to Cope and Ben.
The Spaceways president reached a hand and paused a few centimeters from the implements to ask permission. Pollan nodded, and Cope picked up several tools to admire, passing them to Ben, who handed them in turn to Teke. Cope did this with several exemplary and exotic screwdrivers, socket wrenches, wire strippers and whatnot, before seizing the one Ben was sure he targeted from the first.
Its handle was the length of a screwdriver’s, but rounded and dark rubbery, likely insulation. The business end looked something like a pastel orange tubular glass bell, complete with tonsil-shaped flapper in the middle.
Cope rapped a steel desk support with the handle. He repeated this more cautiously with the bell end, using a bit of sleeve to protect the glassy end from the desk metal. The bell didn’t ring. Then Cope studied the butt-end of the handle.
“No idea,” Pollan muttered.
“Battery’s dead,” Cope observed.
“Power pack,” Teke offered, pointing to a chunky red thing in the toolbox.
Pollan laughed. “Duh. OK, you got me on that one.”
Ben picked up the power pack and studied it. No specifications were labeled on the outside. It featured a single out lead with four different plugs, one of which matched the orange bell’s needs. “Got a multimeter?”
Pollan scrounged in his closet again to supply one. Ben ignored the others for a time as he characterized what exactly the red charger required on input and what its assorted outputs delivered. He kept notes on his pocket tab. Then he laid the power pack in front of Cope. By then, the president was wheedling again, for the bell tool as a gratuity in addition to all images, delivered now.
“Pollan, be reasonable,” Cope argued. “How many are in on this deal? Spaceways is committed. We can’t back out. We’ll deliver. And you have no idea what the pretty bell does.”
“And the charger,” Ben suggested. “You didn’t even know what it was.”
“And the other one,” Teke added. “The prong you hid at the bottom of the toolbox. We need that.”
“A prong,” Cope marveled. “What, does it vibrate? What do you need a prong for, Pollan?”
The other was caught between chuckling at the joke, and glowering at Teke. “Physicist, huh?”
“Denali,” Teke professed, hand over heart.
“That means ‘crazy nut job’ in Mahinan,” Zan clarified. Along purely for defense, he’d never left the love seat.
Hunter stretched beside him, and folded his hands behind his neck. “The deal is 20% more valuable with the provisions. Give or take. To several parties.”
Cope gauged Pollan’s face. “Six star drives, third generation. You get two.” He leaned in. “I enriched the deal for you. I bet that tool makes a lousy vibrator. Gimme.”
Zan mused, “Or we could come back.”
Pollan glanced uneasily to the hunter. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I know where you hide,” Zan explained. “Why, was I being subtle?”
“Not especially,” Teke assured him.
“Diplomatic immunity,” Cope confided in Pollan. “Zan can get away with murder. But no threats between friends, eh, Pollan? You still owe me for dumping your hard water.” That was Pollan’s radioactive chore that nearly killed him.
“If you still held that against me, you wouldn’t be here.”
“I might,” Cope refuted him. “What ever happened to old Commander Alohan, anyway?”
Pollan looked squirrelly instead of answering promptly. Ben supplied, “Knifed to death. Couldn’t happen to a nicer gal.”
Cope grinned crookedly. “Deal, Pollan?” he pressed. “All the images. Two tools and a charger. None of them doing you any good. Hell, I’ll even tell you what this thing does once I figure it out.” He dug the prong out of the toolbox.
Ben noted its metal had the same oily sheen as the moose antlers. Other than that, it looked like a coated loop, long and bent, like a simple curved wire whisk but thick and rigid, with a handle that matched the bell. When Cope set it down, Ben verified that it was also battery operated, via the same plug as the bell used. Nothing else seemed to use that plug shape.
It was a sad and rudimentary form of engineering, but they were used to it here in the Aloha system. Most of their residual technology flew way over their heads, the knowledge and skills lost. Matching plug to socket wasn’t much, but it was a start. These inscrutable tools belonged together. Pollan probably wanted the prong as a sample of the unfamiliar antler alloy, and Teke for the same reason.
Pollan thought it over, his gaze coming to rest on Zan. The hunter cocked his head and bared his teeth. Pollan still hesitated.
Hunter mused, “You never returned to Mahina, Pollan. Ever think you might?”
The old chief snorted. “You can’t get me back into MA. I’m a convict. And you’re not in power anymore, Burke!”
“Mahina Actual, no,” Hunter conceded. “But Schuyler’s a big town now. You can see that by eyeball from here. Big enough to hide in. I lost an election. That doesn’t mean I’m out of power. Notice how I’m on a Spaceways ship. I’m in on this deal. Things that make you go, ‘hmm.’”
“Hell. Alright. For a second third-gen drive. Screw me and you’re a dead man, Copeland. You may be a fancy company president these days. But you ain’t playing in a boardroom out here. And you’re playing hardball.”
“I’m a good man, Pollan,” Cope assured him. “So are you. Like Burke says, whenever you decide to hump rego again, we’ll make that happen for you. So give.”
Pollan was sold. They collected up their loot, and Pollan accompanied them back on the terrifying glass elevator. At his ‘public’ door, they nodded farewell.
Everyone kept their own thoughts until they were through the funky chimney.
“You recognized it?” Ben asked Cope softly. “Device number two?”
“I did,” Cope confirmed. “Once you found the right backup image. All three are priceless.”
“I didn’t,” Teke complained. “What was the middle item?”
“Not here,” Cope decreed, before Ben could respond.
“Cope, I need to speak to you privately,” Ben asserted, in his best captain’s order voice. “Regarding provisions and paddies.”
His ex grimaced, to Ben’s satisfaction. He’d been grimacing inside ever since ‘extra provisions’ were mentioned. There was only one way he could interpret Prosper’s role in this multi-party deal. This was Cope’s paddy coyote scheme, importing freed Sagamore farm slaves onto Mahina.
Paddy wagons. Hell.
17
“Afraid to be alone with me?” Ben quipped, taking a cross-legged seat on the steel overhead facing Cope, seated likewise. This particular spot was directly ‘above’ Eli’s tree sale rejects, not far from the ventilation bulkhead. When they were free to speak privately, Ben invited his ex to the office. Instead Cope climbed the wall.
