Starship thrive, p.21
Starship Thrive, page 21
part #4 of Thrive Space Colony Series
Maybe a politician and revolutionary could do something about that. And just maybe it was high time these worlds worked together. What Sass and Dad had accomplished so far was already bearing fruit. These worlds had to work together or fail alone.
Today was the right opportunity to hammer that nail home. Kassidy had already softened the wood for him.
Hunter got on the phone with Atlas Pratt first in Mahina Actual. He worked his way up to Pierre Lavelle in Saggy Town.
And Sally was right. If the kids were willing, it was high time they moved to Schuyler.
32
Three weeks later, Ben blearily poured himself some coffee and dropped into a seat in the galley. His best friend and lover hadn’t come to bed last – well, it wasn’t night. The pattern of their days was to ground the ships, collect in the Thrive, and pass out during the worst of the burgeoning sunshine hours, now over half of the too-short 20 hour clock.
Cope hunched over a new device he’d apparently built over siesta. Utterly exhausted, he needed to pause every couple minutes to wipe the sweat dripping from his nose. Parked on the ash field bowl of Denali Prime, its bright gray reflecting light everywhere, their spaceship had turned into an oven.
Abel dragged into his usual seat beside Cope, looking likewise wrecked. They all did. “Hey, Cope, anything you could do about the temperature?”
“Busy.” The engineer tucked a flopping coil into his new-made box, and teased out a tiny fan. He’d printed the parts from plastic except for the wiring. The whole contraption came to about a foot cubed. Doggedly, he fastened the fan with tiny screws.
“I see that,” Abel attempted. “But we can’t work if we’re too hot to sleep.”
“Fuck off,” Cope invited.
“Hey!”
“Abel,” Ben interceded. “Whatcha making, buddy?”
Copeland made a final connection, then flipped a switch. The fan whirred. He stared at his little box in hope, then closed his eyes and slumped back in relief.
Ben leaned in and basked in a stream of cool air. Abel crowded in from the other side. Copeland straight-armed the first mate out of the way, allowing only Ben to share his treat.
“Please tell me we each get one,” Abel begged.
“No,” the engineer replied. “But it’ll cool me down so I can think straight to come up with a real solution. And then get back to the damned fuel problem. We came to Denali Prime to get fuel. To go home.”
Ben felt torn. His lover was clearly in the wrong. But Cope was also close to boiling over, in his estimation. “Maybe I could make copies for you.”
Cope shook his head. “Feel the other side. This is a glorified ice wand.”
Ben tested the outflow as directed. Sure enough, Cope’s little device blasted heat toward the far side of the table.
“Dammit!” Abel hollered, pounding against the table edge. “Cope, we need to sleep! Summer is just around the corner! It’s getting worse every day!”
“I know that!” Cope yelled back. “But someone took the manic pill! Then someone sold all my refrigerant! And someone sold my steel printer stock!”
“Guys, stop!” Ben ordered. “Cope, calm down.”
Cope paused to glare at him. Then he plucked up his little air conditioner and tools, shot a middle finger at his lover, and stormed out.
Ben sighed and reconsidered his breakfast. Yet again, the menu featured room-temperature yam noodles. Today some shreds of cabbage and festive pink fish paste swam in a soy-and-vinegar watery sweet sauce. Today, like every day since the evacuation of Denali Prime began, he expected to sit in a pilot or gunner chair. Another massive thunderstorm struck just before bed, unleashing torrents of rain. All of his progress at clearing ash awaited him to do all over again.
Abel was right. They couldn’t go on like this.
“I can’t eat this,” Ben announced, and rose from the table.
“Where are you going?” the first mate demanded.
“To help Cope fix the heat,” Ben told him over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “I’m on engineering today.”
From the catwalk, he spotted his partner trying to work under the staircase, perched on a crate, attempting to ignore the crazed hub-bub. Denali rescue workers had taken over their cargo hold. By now, Sass more-or-less took direction from Selectman Gorey and his counterpart from Hermitage. Go here, go there, clear ash, ferry refugees.
They were doing a fantastic job on the evacuation. It was just a big honking job that had nothing to do with the Mahinans. Yet the Thrive crew could not escape the Herculean task in good conscience. It wouldn’t do them any good, anyway. What they needed was fuel. They still hadn’t found the depot. And anyone who could help them was busy saving lives and salvaging equipment.
Ben trotted down the stairs to join Cope. “Second engineer reporting for duty, Chief. How can I help?”
“I was a complete ass,” Cope groused.
“So was he,” Ben asserted cheerfully. “Buddy, forget it. We need you thinking about how to fix the heat, not about a stupid spat over breakfast. So what are we doing?”
Cope closed his eyes and breathed out into the merciful breeze from his air conditioner. Ben gave him a moment for emotional reset. At last Cope nodded. “You know what I want? I don’t want you working on my project. I want you to think outside the box. Come up with new ideas. Brainstorm.”
Ben nudged him. “Not even a hint of what you’re doing? So we aren’t working on the same thing?”
Cope shrugged. “Old-fashioned air conditioner. Big. Refrigerant. Coils to absorb heat inside. Compressor to dump it outside. Clay’s son, Hunter, got us instructions for how to manufacture the refrigerant from the ice wands. Reza got someone in Waterfalls to make me a batch. They’re making some Saggy bubble stuff, too. I’ll get a few gallons of the coolant next time we’re in town. Brute force. But it’ll work.
“So brainstorm with me. What else could we do? Because this’ll take a week.”
“Outside the box,” Ben murmured. The first thing he thought was that the laws of thermodynamics left him very much inside a box, and that box got hotter every day. He breathed out explosively. “OK, why are we hot? Because we cool the ship with heat-dissipating fins stuck out into the cold of space, or the cold of night –”
“That’s not why we’re hot,” Cope interrupted. He pointed at the bulkhead. “Insulated. We generate heat inside a thermos. Sorry. You’re brainstorming. I’ll shut up now.”
Ben studied the bulkhead above the giant cargo door. “No, that was useful. My first thought was to build a sunshade. But the outside doesn’t conduct heat to the inside, does it?”
“Shouldn’t,” Cope agreed. “If it does, we need to fix that.”
Ben made a note of that, then returned to generating dumb ideas. “Paint it white. No, that’s the thermos argument again. Build a cool hole to stick our heat fins into. Heat fins.” He glanced to the airlock where he’d married the bio-lock. “Aw, hell.”
He’d built a giant heat fin, then hooked it into the airlock. Except it conducted heat from the outdoors in, right now, along with everyone who entered through the bio-lock. He scrunched his eyes shut and hung his head. “How do you do this, Cope? I suck as an engineer!”
“No, you don’t,” Cope consoled him. “Create, then adjust. If you can’t make a mistake, you can’t make anything.” He sighed. “Then you advance to the point where they trust you so much, people die from your mistakes. Then you wish you were never born.”
Ben peeled an eye open and glared at him. “Too dark. Self-pitying. Lame.”
At least he got his partner to chuckle. “OK, go away now. Great third officer act, Acosta. Sass is rubbing off on you. You got me back on task. But leave me alone, and go spin ideas. Come back when you’ve got something.”
Relieved that he managed to cheer up his partner – and get his head back on cooling, rather than kicking himself over trading barbs with Abel – Ben wandered over to his inadvertent reverse-heat-fin attachment. Yes, indeed, the metal coupling nearly burned his hand. Why did he use steel anyway, when Cope was short of steel? That was dumb.
Steel. He hadn’t seen much of it at Waterfalls. But he’d seen it here at Denali Prime. Stainless steel! He made a note to follow that up later.
“Whatcha doing?” the guard Cortez inquired, bored.
Her boss-and-lover Wilder insisted she stand guard in the cargo hold whenever Denali were aboard. The hunters handled any passengers who got out of line. She was supposed to monitor, and make sure no one slacked off on bio-containment the way they did at home. The locals hated sluicing off their bakkra, and felt naked without it.
Ben replied, “Trying to think of ways to cool us off until Cope can get a real air conditioning system rigged. So he can get back to the fuel problem.”
“What’s the bottleneck?”
“Coolant. Steel. Hey, can you operate the plastic printer while you watch the door?”
“Oh, God, please!” Cortez begged, fingers steepled Denali-fashion. The gesture looked off with a laser rifle nestled in her elbow. “I swear, sar, if any bakkra are left by the final chamber, gongs sound. Can’t miss it.”
Ben laughed. “Yeah, I’ve heard your new alarm. Nearly scared me off the john yesterday.”
She smirked. “I was bored day before yesterday. Still bored.”
He nodded. “I’ll get back to you!”
Next he drifted among the Denali, surveying to learn what they did to keep cool. Selectman Gorey had commandeered Cope’s fancy new seat and desk at the engineering control station, still a freestanding podium on the other skyship, the Koala. Denali koala were – surprise! – ferocious, sported an orange mohawk, and weighed over a ton.
Gorey claimed that hunters – no surprise here, either – did not suffer heatstroke. Or if they did, they didn’t admit it. Or if they had to admit it because they were hospitalized, it was due to extraordinary circumstances that superseded proper precautions.
Ben pursed his lips wryly. Like every challenge they refuse to back down from. Most of the hunters he saw in the Denali dome shelter suffered from heatstroke. The caste raised macho to an art form. At first, he thought they were all men. But Aurora explained to him that no, many of the women took testosterone from before adolescence to grow stronger and more aggressive. Awesome. To Cope’s bemused follow-up question, she clarified that the hunters had about the same proportion of homosexuals as cosmos. Many women just appeared male outside the loincloth. And used the pronoun ‘he.’
Now Ben listened politely to their ideas and home remedies. Some of the leaves they mentioned sounded worth a try next time he sweat his sunblock off and got burnt. Then he wandered upstairs to grill Sass and Clay. Earth got hot at the end, he reasoned. And Mahina’s settlers lived in cheap geodesic domes while they built the atmosphere. Surely they knew techniques?
“Fans,” Sass replied. Indeed, she’d glued some circles of plastic sheeting to rods. Both she and her ‘husband’ waved them at their faces as she spoke. She flapped it at Ben for a moment in demonstration, and doused her brow with water again. “Evaporation. Water.”
“I had a pocket fan,” Clay shared. “On a water bottle. It spritzed water at your face, and then the fan blew the water dry. And I drank the water.”
“I like that!” Sass agreed.
“Can you show me a design of this?” Ben encouraged.
Clay gave up hunting for a photo after a few minutes and just sketched the thing. Sass added that ideally it would stick into a pocket or go on a lanyard around the neck to carry around, and operate off a standard rechargeable.
“Or just a fold-up fan you can stick in your pocket,” Sass allowed. “Sorry, it never got this hot in the mountains where I lived on Earth. We had fans or we had nothing. Toward the end, it rained most of the time.”
A couple hours later, Ben reported back to the chief, who’d fallen asleep in the outflow from his little cooling unit, head propped under a stair edge where he wouldn’t get kicked.
Ben woke him with a squirt of water from his new fan-squirter-bottle. He took the first off Cortez’s assembly line after the prototype. She kept the prototype for herself.
Copeland laughed and grabbed it for study. “Not bad, squirt!” He matched action to word. “What else?”
Ben ran down his list. He slowed down on his new plastic replacements for the clamps connecting the bio-lock to the ship. Cope vetoed replacing the clamps themselves, but praised his efforts and told him where to splice in plastic to cut the heat conduction to the clamps.
“And steel,” Ben offered. “There’s cutlery in the city we could scrounge. Pots, forks, knives, spoons. I can melt it outside Thrive, turn it into printer stock. It’s crap quality, but ought to be good enough for fan blades and piping.”
“Well done!” Cope nearly hummed. “That it?”
“I could make the bio-locks cooler.” Ben showed his plans for building a foamcrete shelter for the converted containers. “And paint it with ash and glue to reflect the sun.”
Cope squirted himself and let the little hand fan dry it off. “That helps the bio-lock users. Fixing the couplings is the part that helps us.”
“Point. And there’s a leaf you can chew,” Ben offered. “Makes you feel cooler on the inside, and you take the chewed-up leaf and spread it on your forehead and feet. Sort of like evaporating peppermint. Except it tastes awful.” As Cope began to silently laugh at him, the younger man defended, “Hey! Eli’s isolated the compound! It works. He just doesn’t have the ingredients to make it in bulk. And the leaves are free, so...”
Cope grew solemn. “Good work, Ben. Thank you. Get that bio-lock fixed. I’ll ask Gorey if his crews can collect steel for us.”
Sticky chewed green leaves got all over the sheets while they slept. The tiny bottle fans weren’t very powerful. But Thrive grew marginally cooler once Ben got the bio-locks properly shaded and inserted the plastic insulators to keep their clamps from conducting heat inside. Those stopgap measures only took a couple days, and didn’t greatly interfere with their contribution to the ongoing evacuation.
Cope persuaded Sass to waste some fuel gaining altitude in a rainstorm. They hovered up there for an hour, battered by the storm with the heat fins extended, to temporarily bleed the ship’s internal temperature down to 27 degrees – or 80 Fahrenheit as the Denali reckoned.
The other metal deposit on the spaceport was once another ship, crushed beyond any hope of repair. Gorey didn’t consult with any other Selectmen. He simply let Thrive claim a third of it for salvage.
Ben and Cortez, with a team of Denali techs, spent one of the worst nights of their lives melting down steel scrap and rendering it into high- and low-grade printer stock.
They set up their furnaces in a hollow on the Denali Prime ash plain that used to hold domes, all of them destroyed. The depression hadn’t existed on the pre-eruption topographic maps. Something big must have exploded there.
By two weeks after they began the great air conditioning quest, Cope finally had his parts made. He put Cortez and Wilder in charge of tacking up the long coolant pipe-way between the ventilation forward and the compressor top-side. There was some doubt whether the lovers’ relationship would recover from the fight that erupted. Abel took over from Wilder and got it done. Air conditioning began to flow.
And Thrive gradually settled down to 26 degrees. Over the next couple days, Cope tuned the ventilation system to keep the sleeping cabins to 23 degrees, the other working areas 27 degrees, and the warmer miasma banished to the peak of the hold where no one had to work. For any better than that, he’d need a second compressor system.
Sass decreed he should quit while they were ahead. They could sleep and work, and that was good enough. The engineer had more pressing matters to attend to.
Their time on Denali was half gone. With only 3 months left to their departure window, they still didn’t have the fuel to return home. All they’d found at Denali Prime was on the Koala. They’d expended a third of that on Operation Pterry Ferry, shuttling survivors to Waterfalls and Hermitage.
33
What a rude dude, Sass thought to herself, departing from the HQ dome in the ashes of Denali Prime. She’d just escaped an interview with the Hermitage Selectman, Diego, who’d succeeded Gorey for the salvage segment of the recovery program. Gorey handed over the reins when the last of the evacuees were extracted a few days before.
Sass requested this audience to gracefully resign from the project. The ensuing conversation grew less than cordial.
“But of course you will leave the Nanomage, Koala, two pilots, two gunners, and both of your engineers,” Diego demanded.
“With respect, I will ‘leave’ no one and nothing,” Sass countered. “The Koala is a Denali ship. The Nanomage is also a Denali vessel. But you only have one crew to fly it. So it will return to Waterfalls with us. That is my understanding with the Council there.”
Diego had waved a hand in contemptuous dismissal. “I require your engineers, at a minimum.”
“They are not yours to command.”
“We shall see about that!” The guy actually turned on his heel and stomped off.
Fat lot of thanks for us saving 10,000 people! Sass guzzled a quick half liter and fastened her faceplate to step out into the noonday glare and heat. A friendly thermometer by the exit informed her it was 121 degrees. With the sunlight scattered by billions of near-white particles wafting in the air, not a shadow lurked on the spaceport plaza. She tried to stride across the blazing lot quickly, but heat slowed her steps long before she reached the merciful blast-freeze at the trapdoor hatch.
No one worked outside now. Diego scheduled this meeting purposefully as an insult while everyone slept. Why?
As distance intervened, she realized she wasn’t simply irked at the man. His treatment of her truly didn’t make sense. She brought assets and talents that made a huge difference in Denali’s recovery from this disaster. And she owed this turkey nothing. Why didn’t he care to build a constructive relationship?
