Ringship prosper thrive.., p.15
Ringship Prosper (Thrive Space Colony Adventures Book 5), page 15
“Don’t think I can manage that,” Eli hedged.
“Just see what works for now, once you can get in.”
Ben checked the time in worry. He shouldn’t have insisted on cleaning the place first. His stride quickened, until he realized poor Margaux had to jog to keep up. He smiled an apology through his helmet and slowed his pace. “Zan, Wilder, how’s it looking for company?”
Wilder responded. “The urbs are calling out mine security from the neighbors. So far no takers. But there’s a skyship in dock at PM-3. So far its captain says no, but they’re leaning on him hard. A Captain Gorky of the Heavenly Bodies.”
“Thanks. Captain out.” Ben rapidly switched channel. “Hey, Gork! How’s the Heavy Boobs treating you?” Tacky, but that’s what Gorky fondly called his ship. He rapidly renewed his social bonds with the competition while they hustled through the hallway, to reinforce the other captain’s resolve to stay grounded and off his butt.
23
The first mate Willow banked around yet again to carve another corner off the great iceberg. Two more passes ought to fill the reservoir. She couldn’t ram any more chunks in, having blocked the crevice with blocks. Now she was melting water to fill it to the brim. The rest waited on top to melt when the sun came up in 36 hours or so.
The work was going well. But her mental state was caroming downhill fast. Tiny boots, she said to herself. What is this, a shoe store? By now she’d convinced herself she worked for the stupidest captain ever born.
This was not difficult – she believed that in the first place.
But now the comms channel from Mahina Actual urged any officer on Prosper to surrender the ship in exchange for clemency. The urb provided specifics of the sort of punishment in store for a ship’s officer who knowingly acted as an accessory to a crime. She was rather less specific about what that crime might be. Immigration to Mahina was not illegal, for the simple reason that until recently, it never happened. They were a backward colony in the Aloha system, where the three worlds barely acknowledged each other’s existence. Sass Collier changed that with the Thrive. But at first only a few Saggies came from Hell’s Bells, and they brought with them monumental advances in technology.
The advantages to Mahina of the ongoing revolution in Sagamore were harder to assess. And no one liked the grumbling, hex-sign-slinging paddies, least of all Willow.
Yet here she was, covering for that silly frill of a captain again, risking imprisonment, all for a pack of paddies. In what universe did this make sense? She ought to –
She jumped as Teke knocked on the door behind her. She swerved the ship so bad her laser missed the iceberg and cut a line across the regolith. Fortunately, because Ben said so, her guns were only live on outward swings from the crappy warehouse excuse for a ghost town.
“What?” she hollered at Teke. “See what you made me do?”
“I don’t think I did,” Teke returned, amused. Raised in a creche, it was hard to get a rise out of the physicist. He tuned out hordes of rotten little kids from birth. “Do you wear tiny boots?”
“No! Kassidy has the smallest feet on the ship.”
“She’s wearing her only pair of boots.”
“Clogs,” Willow suggested, with a put-upon sigh. Rather than come around again, she held the ship at hover. “Maybe you could find a clog pattern for the plastic printer. We can’t make boots.”
Teke leaned in the doorway, his gleaming bald head hanging over his comm, apparently researching her suggestion. Maybe the Denali didn’t know what clogs were. “Clogs are hard slip-on shoes.”
“Found it,” he agreed. “And we have a pattern. But what size is ‘tiny’?”
Willow threw up her hands. “Ask your idiot of a lover. No, he wouldn’t know. Ask Kassidy what Ben meant.”
“Do you always speak of your captain this way?”
“He’s destroying my career!”
“I rather think he’s risking his own,” Teke differed, and tapped in a query, presumably to Kassidy. “As for my lovers, I hardly think that’s any of your business. Unless you’re offering.” He paused. “The answer would be no. But thank you, it’s flattering to be asked.”
“I didn’t make a pass at you!” Willow barked at him. “You’re half my age!”
“I wasn’t aware you were nearly sixty.”
“I’m forty-five! And I’m sure there’s no room in your three-way.”
“Ah,” the annoying physicist breathed. He turned and left.
And to think she used to fantasize about them, just last week. Three gorgeous guys – well, alright, she only fantasized about Ben and Teke in bed with her. Her imagination couldn’t quite stretch to the crusty engineer Copeland naked in this tableau. Though she could almost visualize Ben and Cope getting it on. Not that they had in a while, years, but she was certain Ben was trying to trip the company president back into bed. He would!
“– Mahina Control, hailing any officer of the skyship Prosper. Your window to surrender your vessel will come to a close in ten minutes. I remind you, if you continue to back your rogue captain, you will be liable –”
Willow punched it off again. She’d heard her the first three times, and thank you very much for continuing the countdown! Leery, she checked her display for approaching ships. But Mahina Security could wipe their traces from the moon-wide tracking system. She tapped up another display for radar, and found nothing. Why ten minutes? Their ships wouldn’t be in range yet. Their guns had been in range all along. They just couldn’t bring to bear on the surface.
It’s a deadline. If I don’t comply by the deadline, they’ll shoot me out of the air.
She didn’t pause to wonder how likely this really was. There were a grand total of five skyships serving Mahina, every one of them 80-year relics or older, precious and almost irreplaceable, though Copeland tried. Any officer who blew up a skyship could kiss their career goodbye. Willow knew this in theory.
But the countdown and continual threats were wearing on her.
I’m an officer of Spaceways! she suddenly thought. Not just a subordinate to Ben. But an officer of the corporation!
That felt slightly more empowering, so she doubled down. The stockholders would thank me for preserving this ship!
If she thought carefully about this argument, she might have recalled that in this new, leaner Thrive Spaceways, President Copeland owned over half of the stock, and Captain Acosta most of the remainder. But she didn’t think about that.
Maybe grateful enough to give me the ship. Captain Arbuckle has a nice ring to it.
She hung with the ship poised in the air, above a grubby spent mine, between an iceberg and a warehouse of frozen paddies. I could say I panicked. Her fingers panned through flight plans Ben had on tap. One hardly needed a pilot anymore on Prosper. Just select between one of the many trips the ship had taken before, and hit go. Ben was completely unnecessary.
Of course, Ben was the one who devised all those flight plans over the years. She knew that, too, but didn’t bring it to mind just then. Instead she copied a program for a simple MA to MO hop, and adjusted the takeoff location to KM-2. Easy.
Suddenly cold metal pressed against her ear. She leaned away and whipped her head to look into the barrel of a stunner, and then up to the cold and alien blue-green eyes of the physicist, who smiled faintly.
“Get out of that seat. Before I kill you.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” Willow was tempted to deny he had any reason to do this. He was simply crazy. The piloting plot from KM-2 to MO displayed right on the screen in front of her, labeled as such. But he wouldn’t know that, would he?
Teke smirked. “Wouldn’t I? Are you sure? You’re a very annoying woman. Petty. And I am Denali. So hard to predict which way an alien will jump, isn’t it? Get out of that chair. Don’t you dare touch the console.”
“You need me to land first!”
“I doubt that very much.” Teke shocked her by thwacking her across a hand with the stunner. “Your face is next.”
Crumpled over her bruised hand, she hastily exited the chair, shrieking. “You’re insane! Wait til your frill Ben hears what you’ve done!”
Once she was out of reach of the controls, Teke flung her to the floor and stuck a knee in her back. He holstered the gun in a utility pocket, then used her own coveralls to tie her up, with no concern whatsoever for her modesty. Denali wore nothing but loincloths at home.
Thoroughly trussed in her own sleeves and utility belt, Teke frog-marched her to the catwalk railing and bent her half over it, to gaze down into the cargo hold below. An easy jump with a grav generator – Willow hopped it all the time. But she couldn’t access her device with her arms tied around herself. The cargo floor six meters below, in a full 1 g, had never looked so menacing. Teke did something behind her back, but she couldn’t see what.
She gulped. “I didn’t do anything. I was thinking about it, that’s all.”
And without warning, he hauled her bodily over the railing and let her drop!
Willow screamed. Then she realized she was at maybe .3 g, not 1 g. And she was bouncing, face down. Suspended from her hips, her head and legs hung below. “A bungee? You bastard, you dangled me on a bungee cord?”
Teke didn’t bother to reply. After a few minutes, she felt the ship come to rest, and the engines cut back to idle. The damned physicist passed above her on the catwalk, leaving officer country, and hopped into the cargo hold. On the way down he yanked her bungee cord to set her bouncing again.
She shrieked out imprecations at him a few more times, demanding to be let loose. He ignored her. Bastard!
24
In the KM-2 galley, the botanist Eli finished studying the manifest from Lavelle’s extra containers, the supplies they brought in addition to the boxes of frozen immigrants. In slow motion, he slipped his tab back into his pocket.
Two cryo-sick paddy ‘techniques’ sat on the floor, trying to revive a soy protein printer. But this was a technology not used on Sagamore, least of all by the agricultural slave class. And the corroded old printer was likely abandoned here because it didn’t work. He had no reason to believe they’d succeed at fixing it.
And time was running out. That’s my number one.
Under extraordinary circumstances 13 years ago, Captain Sass Collier appointed Eli her ‘biological control officer.’ As the Thrive’s only scientist, however ill-suited to the task, Eli rose to the challenge. He even led the way into the ruins under the volcano flows of Denali Prime.
Naturally Ben fingered him to do it again. Eli’s job was to make sure they left these refugees in ‘good enough’ condition. Not from the engineering end – that was Cope and Ben’s lookout, he reminded himself. His job was the big picture. Would they be OK? If not, what could they do about it? Because they had to leave, ready or not, or risk the ship being impounded, and their crew thrown in jail.
Botany wasn’t the best preparation for this judgment call. Though it surely helped. He spared a brief smile for Quire. They’d arrayed most of the trees along the hallway wall, concerned that the outrageously thorough cleaning cycle might be a weekly event. Paddies didn’t grow trees in their low-overhead tunnels on Sagamore. Gentle Quire took wobbly cryo-shock sufferers and laid them wonderingly under the scrawny saplings. He modeled breathing deep.
That much they’d accomplished by now. The air quality was great, check. The cafeteria remained chilly, but the medics preferred it that way, and it was no longer dangerously cold in the star-side night. Whether the cooling would work after the sun rose… Eli made a note of that concern. But they’d be long gone by sunrise.
The sanitation facilities were inadequate for this many people once they roused. He remembered Margaux’s competence. That problem he could safely leave in their hands. He was less confident of the paddy medics on resuscitation. The security forces, he decided, callously assigning the urb cops a chore. Whether they liked it or not, they would not arrive here without rendering emergency medical assistance. Kassidy would see to that.
He paused in his walk-through and surreptitiously watched a paddy family group, mother and grandmother soothing children, the father too ill to be much use. Resilient people, accustomed to violent adversity and criminal neglect. He admired their tenacity. Flashing hex signs at everyone wasn’t the most effective form of defiance. But disciplined by asphyxiation, this was the only resistance they could afford. Psychic spirit OK.
But the food supply was not. He nodded to himself in decision, and affixed his helmet for privacy as he completed his circuit and landed back in the kitchen.
“Ben, Cope, got a minute? Eli reporting in.”
“Eli!” Ben acknowledged. “We’re getting down to the wire.”
“Understood,” Eli replied. “Potable water?”
Cope said, “Online now, just flushing the pipes. You could open the galley faucets for me.”
Eli stepped to the vast sinks and yanked on half a dozen handles. The brownish gray flow, foaming with detergent, looked repulsive. To judge by the scrunched noses of the technicians, it smelt as bad as it looked. But the initial sludge was clearing. “Done. The reason I’m calling. Top priority at this point is a soy printer.”
Ben suggested, “If all else fails, soak a protein brick in water and eat it.”
“You asked me to evaluate,” Eli reminded him. “I’m telling you. Psychologically, they need the printer. They need familiar food in outrageously strange surroundings. They cannot get it from the supplies at hand. Unless we leave them with a soy printer, I’m afraid they won’t eat what we leave them. And that’s their only option.”
“Ben?” Cope prompted.
“That’s your recommendation?” Ben objected. “Take my galley printer?”
“You guys have performed miracles on environmental,” Eli soothed. “Their technicians are surprisingly good. We’ve got vast medical needs here, and the world will be watching while the urb cops put up and shut up. But a little familiar food would go a long, long way. They have enough with the soy stock, and that’ll provide everything they need to recover and do the work on their new place. But they need to eat it.”
“Ben, we can buy a new one,” Cope suggested softly.
After another moment, Ben blew out and acquiesced. “Alright. Thank you, Eli, for a fantastic evaluation. As always. I’ll ask Teke to yank the printer for you. Make sure you demo how to use it ASAP. And program it for your emotional sustenance.” He snorted.
“Thank you,” Eli said sincerely. “And guys, truly, incredible work.”
“You too, Eli. They’ll be OK?” Cope prompted.
“They can be,” Eli judged. “Up to them. Eli out.”
He spared a moment to tell the pair of ‘techniques’ on the floor to give up and rest, then headed off at a trot. Prosper had returned to the main parking lot by this point. Thanks to his enforced daily run, the botanist made it in a few minutes. Once inside, he only paused to leave his helmet by the big cargo door.
“Eli!” Willow screamed. “Get me down from here.”
The computer donged a few notes preparatory to an announcement, and intoned, “On orders of Teke, First Mate Willow Arbuckle is to be left dangling.”
Eli smirked in appreciation. Even at 17, the stowaway had been scary thorough at revenge. He gravity-hopped up to the catwalk and strode into the galley. “What did Willow do to piss you off?”
Teke was already applying tools to the extract-the-printer problem. A top-of-the-line built-in, the contraption was about 2x1x1 meters and wedded to the cabinets. “Give me a hand?”
Eli doffed the top half of his pressure suit to dangle from his utility belt. Then he helped Teke jigger the printer out another few centimeters, still seeking access to its water and power connections. The appliance was truly not designed for their roll-out maintenance convenience. Teke slapped another grav lifter underneath to cancel out its weight and gave it another hard yank from the middle. That worked. He kneeled on the counter, draping himself over the box to get at the power connection.
Eli checked his side, and found he could reach the water hose. “You shut these off?”
“Yeah, I cut power and water first. Willow tried to steal the ship,” the physicist replied belatedly. “You think maybe a white board underneath? Take crew suggestions on what to do with her.”
“Steal the ship?” Eli echoed. “Space her. But I wanted to do that already, so. A shame you didn’t gag her.”
“No,” Teke argued. “She’s her own worst enemy. The more she talks, the more people agree to space her.” Both chuckled. “Done on my side. Want me to…no, you’re doing fine.”
Eli brained himself on the cabinet hole. There was a screw sticking out there to stab him, too. A bit of blood showed on his palm after he rubbed the spot. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I build my own instruments. There, got it.”
“I know,” Teke agreed. “You’re one of the scientists I admire and emulate. Thank you, Professor.”
“Too kind,” Eli acknowledged, but crimped his lip in enjoyment. “Good work, Professor. Teaching anything good lately?” They guided the levitating printer to a grav lifter awaiting in the dining area.
“Freshman E&M,” Teke admitted grimly. “Five hundred students. So sorry to walk out on that.”
Eli barked a laugh. “I caught Terraforming 101 this semester. Eight hundred. Damned shame.” They traded high-fives. “Clean it?”
“No time.” Teke retrieved the grav generator from the underside of the printer, and slapped the grav lifter power on. “I’ll get you as far as the ramp. I’m ship security today.”
“I can relate,” Eli breathed. Conversation lapsed as they guided the bulky machine downstairs. Before they reached the door, Zan and Wilder burst in. Wilder dove for the ladder access to the shuttle. Zan took a flying leap on gravity from mid cargo-hold toward the bridge.
