Ringship prosper thrive.., p.3
Ringship Prosper (Thrive Space Colony Adventures Book 5), page 3
“You should tell him,” Josiah resumed his thought. “Be straight with him from the start. If Ben’s not on board with the plan, leave him groundside.”
Cope traced a spiral in the sweat on his glass. “I hear you. I do. But none of this goes against his principles. That’s the bogeyman with Ben, violating his precious ideals. I married a regular Don Quixote. The jobs are tilting at windmills. He’ll love them once he’s stuck with them.”
Josiah swooped an exaggerated nod. “Then why lie to him?”
“Personal baggage. Look, Teke’s the physicist. Ben divorced me over Teke. The first op will get the ship blacklisted. Practically a rego badge of honor now. But Ben’s the last skyship captain this damned administration hasn’t blacklisted yet. He’s been off-world. He doesn’t understand what we’re up against here. He’ll be surrounded by friends. He’ll come around.”
“He’s not here now,” Josiah pointed out, studying Cope through his amber pint glass. “Why’s that?”
Cope hunkered forward, the same way he did as a kid when he was ashamed of having screwed up. Josiah’s heart used to bleed for him. The young mechanic expected so much of himself, considered any glitch a mortifying failure, when Josiah knew no one could have done any better. Screw-ups happened.
“I laid off his crew,” the younger man admitted bitterly. “Without severance. I didn’t have the money to pay them –”
“Well, fuck that!” Josiah exploded. “How much? For three weeks’ severance and back time off.”
“I wasn’t asking for –” Cope attempted.
“That was your first mistake!” the gangster thundered. “Get the number from Ben. Get it now.” He couldn’t believe this. All the years he’d nurtured his talent, and Cope screwed this up? Loyalty was everything. If you didn’t have allies who’d die for you at the drop of a hat, you could never be a boss worth a damn. The brainy mechanic was too damned technical, not enough touch.
By the time Cope complied, and got his numbers back from the captain, Josiah had calmed himself down.
“Sorry I didn’t manage that better,” Copeland muttered.
“You’re juggling a lot this week,” Josiah allowed. “Just don’t forget the basics while you’re reaching for the stars. You want the kid to stay here? Or an apartment in town? I can watch him either way.”
“In town is good. Ben’s father is the first he’ll call with a problem. But a dentist from Poldark isn’t always the right answer to a Schuyler problem.”
“You got that right. Let him know he can call on me. And the other kids?”
“In the creche. Nico can visit them during the week. Ben’s dad on the weekends. I’ll miss them like hell, but.”
“Alright. See? We take care of basics first. Next step, we add a couple thousand voting immigrants. Who vote our way.” The election had been that close.
They put their heads together and Josiah laid out the plan.
He’d been wary of running this operation with Cope. Lately, the guy had been flying high with his ever-so-fancy suit and nose-bleed-level investors. Hell, one time Josiah commed him, and the ‘president of Thrive Spaceways’ was out playing croquet on the regolith with stockholders. On a Wednesday afternoon. Un-fucking-believable. If that was the work ethic among the movers and shakers, no wonder this dust ball of a moon was a wreck.
But now Cope looked hungry and fierce again, like the teen freedom fighter Josiah once took under wing. He feared he’d lost Cope to affluence. But scrape off his success a bit, and the young scrapper was still there. Good.
Josiah pulled him in for a handshake and half-hug before sending him to find his kid and the guest suite. Once Copeland was out of earshot, his call to Hunter Burke was brief. “We’re on. Live long and Prosper.”
Burke, the revolutionary who’d received the second most votes of the three running for president, snorted amusement and hung up. The urbs in Mahina Actual Security might have been hamstrung by incompetence on high, but their AIs trolled the airwaves. Hunter didn’t dare say anything on the phone.
The funny thing was, Josiah mused, if Burke had just won like he should have, Josiah was the last person who’d tangle with Sagamore. He loathed the midget paddies and their superstitious gibberish. Sagamore was welcome to keep their slaves. But the demagogue Cole Carmack won the election, and he was screwing the economy to hell. Breaking business was a sin the gangster could not abide.
4
Willow, Prosper’s recent first mate, stood arms crossed and belligerent, staring Ben down at the cargo ramp the next morning. “I ain’t leaving until Cope gets here. If you want to play the flunky, fine! I’ll appeal to the boss. God, I wish you two would make up and get laid.”
“Hey! Too far!” Ben objected on automatic. The observation was true, painful, and none of her business. Alas, Willow was an exceptional first mate. She had a knack for grabbing problem crew by the emotional balls and twisting. Unfortunately, she considered her captain yet another balky crewman to whip into shape.
“Too far?” Willow returned. “Ben, you’re not a starry-eyed 20-year-old anymore. When you fell for the ice man, he was older and wiser. Wake up. You’re the captain now, a big boy, and this is your ship. You say who’s first mate, not him. But if it’s too scary for you to stand up to Cope, I will!”
“Knock, knock!” cried a familiar voice. “I hope I’m interrupting!”
Ben whirled with a grin of anticipation, to watch Kassidy Yang make her entrance. She bounded a few steps up the ramp at Mahina gravity, took a mid-air somersault, then crossed the threshold into the ship’s 1-g doing a cartwheel, with a meaty thunk to a perfect landing.
“Hey you!” she cried, and grabbed Ben into an embrace and kiss. “And I don’t know you, do I?” The charismatic gymnast reached for Willow’s shoulders and kissed her too, another purple-lipstick smack right on the lips. “Any friend of Ben’s is a friend of mine!”
Willow wiped purple off her lips in disbelief. “You don’t even ask first.”
Used to Kassidy’s antics, Ben relaxed happily. “Look at you, back in coveralls. Reliving your youth?”
These days, the onetime starlet was the public face of Yang & Yang Nanoceuticals, the most lucrative firm in the world. Her father’s nanites brought vibrant good health out of the domed urb citadel to the struggling masses on Mahina. Not that Michael Yang liked settlers any more than any other urb. But the urbs exiled him. Then Thrive fetched him back and acquired settler backing for him. The prickly inventor wasn’t fit to deal with human beings. His vivacious daughter more than compensated.
“Cope didn’t tell you,” Kassidy gathered, with a quirked lip. “I’m here for a job. Carmack ‘nationalized’ Yang & Yang. Dad and I don’t own it anymore. They kept him on because he ‘does real work.’ I backed Anjuli Spiegler for president. They shoved me out the door.”
Ben floundered on this news. “Wait, what? How do you nationalize a successful company?”
“They stole it,” Kassidy clarified. “Everything we built. Yup, now belongs to the people. Advanced medical treatment should be free for everyone. According to Carmack, I am an enemy of the people, trying to profit off the little guy’s misery. Who knew I was so evil?”
“I voted for Spiegler,” Ben shared, trying to wrap his head around this. “Don’t tell Cope that.”
The 60-year-old urb Spiegler – her nanites kept her looking 25, like every other urb – had deep and impressive administrative experience. She performed miracles on expanding the creche system to include all settler children. The original deluxe creches, still in use at Mahina Actual and Schuyler, proved far too costly to scale. Spiegler made the hard calls to provide good-enough and improvable kindergartens. She did so with stunning speed, energy, vision, and a hard-nosed devotion to data and ethical experiments. Kassidy was her staunchest public advocate. But with all the settlers voting for their first world-wide president with real power, Ben wasn’t surprised when the two settler candidates won most of the votes.
“I voted for Hunter Burke,” Willow inserted. “How could they take away your company?”
“You guys need to follow the news when you’re off-moon,” Kassidy judged. “Thrive Co, Yang & Yang, all the top companies are folding. Carmack got elected by promising to give every idiot everything for free. He’ll protect them from ‘predation’ by the ‘rich.’ Taxes went through the roof. Willow, you used to be a farmer, right? Outlawed now. You’re not in a ‘protected demographic.’ Only the mentally impaired are allowed to farm anymore. All private farms were claimed by ‘eminent domain.’”
“Is this even vaguely legal?” Ben asked. Maybe the startling demise of Thrive Spaceways wasn’t due to yet another spat between Cope and Abel.
The urb Kassidy shrugged. “Carmack claims that any pre-existing law was established by greedy, evil urb overlords to oppress the people. He packed the legislature to grant him whatever new laws and powers he wanted. The economy is collapsing. I’m sure the kinks will work out. He’s so incompetent even his drooling fans have to admit this won’t work, sooner or later. In the meantime, anyone who wants to make a profit has to go black market. The new taxes suffocate any profit on legal enterprise.”
“I can’t go back to my farm?” Willow backtracked, brow stormy. “What are you here for?”
“To get off this moon,” Kassidy said plainly. “Cope agreed to take me and Eli. He’s driving the grav lifter with the luggage.” She glanced over her shoulder, down the ramp.
The other two followed her gaze. In the distance, across the spaceport expanse of fused regolith, dim in the three-quarter Pono gloom of Saturday, a pocket forest prowled toward them.
“Huh,” Ben voiced with misgiving. Where exactly did Eli expect to stow all that shrubbery? No, not stow – he would intend it fully lit and growing.
“What were you planning to do on the ship?” Willow demanded, holding fast to her canceled authority as first mate.
As a good first mate should, Ben supposed. As captain, he could be too easy going. Willow compensated for that. “Willow, Cope already paid you three weeks’ severance. It nearly killed him to lay you off with no notice and no pay. So he got your money from a grey market contact. Kassidy, she’s no longer employed here. We’re just having a little trouble processing that.” Though if Kassidy was right, and only the black market could remain in business under these conditions, Cope’s appeal to Josiah began to make sense.
“Trouble processing that?” Willow spat in outrage. “I make this ship run! While you play air-headed nice guy!”
There were upsides to losing Willow, Ben reflected. He gave Kassidy a micro-shrug. “Quire is staying. To farm the gardens. He has nowhere else to go.” The quiet Denali farmer grew violently ill on Mahina, unable to acclimate to the air, water, food, or society. Cope hadn’t needed to ask. The rest of the crew got termination paperwork. Cope sent Quire a gentle reassurance that although his pay was suspended, his home was secure as long as they owned the Prosper. Ben began to suspect that might not be long.
He’d never had a real job except on a skyship. He helped out around his dad’s dental practice. But he was a 20-year-old college student when he joined the Thrive. The thought that he might have to give up space flitted into his consciousness, only to bounce off his sunny disposition to vanish as quickly as it came.
“We could use some help here!” Cope boomed across the Schuyler spaceport from the vicinity of the creeping wood. He followed up with an angry comm summons in Ben’s pocket while they were still rummaging for grav lifters and cables. Willow strode onto the ramp with folded arms to glare toward the top boss.
As the laden captain passed her, he noted mildly, “Willow, if you stand any chance with Cope, you’re blowing it. Lend a hand, or shove off.” He left with a clear conscience for her to decide. Kassidy manhandled her trio of grav lifters as though she’d left the crew just the other day, instead of a dozen years ago.
Willow grabbed one lifter from Kassidy’s collection, leaving Ben to manage three himself, plus all the cable. The most lightly laden, the ex first mate quickly pulled into the lead to accost the company president.
“You’re not going to miss her,” Kassidy consoled Ben.
“I might,” Ben returned. “She doesn’t bother me. She’s like loosing an attack robot on anyone who crosses me. Obey nice Ben, or get chewed out by nasty Willow. The dynamic works for me.”
His steps faltered as the tableau resolved before his eyes. Willow and Cope stood aside for their pissing contest, crusty first mate versus Schuyler tough. The nondescript botanist Eli focused entirely on the non-obvious challenge of how to apply more grav lifters to his problem. And then there was Teke.
“Hey, Ben,” the Denali physicist greeted him softly, then hastily bent back to his transit challenge.
“Teke,” Ben acknowledged. “Wasn’t expecting you. Then, I wasn’t really expecting any of you, so.” Just shut up, he implored himself. Teke was his friend, too. The fact that he divorced Cope over Teke was not about Teke. It was about Ben and Cope. “So Eli, do you have a theory about how we can help here? I don’t think we have habitat for all of this.”
Eli straightened and offered him a cable end. “Just sort of corral it all, I guess.”
Ben ignored the cable and started transferring saplings to his grav lifter one by one. Their pots could stagger in two tiers like brick-laying, fitting ten trees to a pallet. “Kassidy, take the shrubs.” With thirty trees and forty smaller plants off their hands, Ben was confident Eli and Teke could manage the rest.
“Aye, sar,” Kassidy replied happily. At a touch, Teke switched to helping her. Eli caught on and lent Ben a hand.
“Ben!” Cope hollered at him, still embroiled with Willow. “Do you want to join this conversation?”
“I don’t,” Ben assured him. “I’m good either way.”
“See, that’s what I’m up against!” Willow renewed her argument against Cope.
“Yeah? Then rego eff off,” Copeland countered. “What do I need a bitchy first mate for? He doesn’t want you, and you’re in my face. Everyone else is working!”
Ben tried to warn her about that. Sadly, he instructed the grav lifters to play follow-the-leader and tested them for a couple meters for stability. Having characterized the wobbles, he reinforced with a few judicious loops of cable. The thing was, if Cope was replacing his crew with a Thrive reunion, Abel was the first mate, and Jules the housekeeper. He took it as given that the Greers would not be joining them this time around. Ben would have to put his foot down and declare his own choice of second in command. But there wasn’t a single one of them suited to it.
Maybe I should argue for keeping Willow.
“Cope, a word?” Ben draped the tail of his cable onto a citrus, and stepped away from Willow. When she tried to follow Copeland, the president shoved her back and threatened to deck her. While hardly Ben’s style, he did appreciate that about his ex. So many men were hesitant to give as good as they got when faced with a female assailant. Cope’s mob upbringing lent him a harder perspective on dealing with the shriller sex.
“I’m not fond of her,” Ben began. As Sass had trained him, it helped to start with a point of emotional alignment. He trusted Cope was disliking Willow plenty by now. “But I need a first mate to run a ship.”
“Point,” Cope allowed. “Hardly worth it, though. I don’t want to live with her.” He paused in thought, then shrugged. “Hunter’s the best we’ve got coming. But up to you.”
“Hunter,” Ben echoed. “Burke?” He didn’t know anyone else named Hunter, though their Denali friend Zan was a hunter, and not half bad as a pilot or gunner.
“Yeah, he’ll probably sneak in around 02:00 or so. Not sure which night. We’ll be stuck here a few days yet.”
“OK, buddy, you and I clearly need to spend some quality and quantity time. On a thorough and far-ranging discussion. Like what is Teke doing here?” Ben pinched the bridge of his nose, then shifted his hand to a warding-off gesture. He hadn’t meant to blurt that. “Not here. Not now. In my office, at your earliest convenience. Within a half hour.”
Cope half-grinned in appreciation. “Make it an hour. Or there’s no telling where the trees end up.”
“Point. No postponements after that, though. No reunion hugs, no nothing. Stow the trees, then you make time to fill me in. Promise me.”
“Will do. And sorry. It’s been a hell of week. Now may I please kick Willow out of my life?”
Ben tilted his head to look around his ex-husband’s rangy shoulder at the bristling package of ornery who’d been his second in command since before Sock was born. He straightened. “Yeah, go for it. You’re sure Hunter can fly a skyship?”
“Hell, no. But Clay taught him to fly. Hunter was my getaway driver once before Thrive. The guy’s a natural. And we’ll pick up Zan soon. He can serve as your third.”
“Deal.” Ben shot Willow a cheery wave. “Bye! An honor and a privilege to serve with you! Use me as a reference any time!”
“You sons of bitches –!”
Ben tuned out her imprecations and added to Cope in a softer voice. “Housekeeping. Also a concern.” And on that beguiling note, he strode back to his grav lifters.
Eli attempted, “I appreciate this, Ben. Taking me in on such short notice.”
“Welcome aboard, Eli,” Ben cut him off. “Did you ask Cope what cubic of foliage you could bring along?”
“Well, half this much,” the botanist conceded. “But I’d be happy to rig extra levels in your engine room.”
“Eli, your engineering sucks,” Ben assured him cheerfully. “And my engine room has racks to the ceiling. Prosper isn’t Thrive. Quire rules my ship gardens.” The Denali even lived in the Prosper’s equivalent to Eli’s old cabin, with tropical flowers and zucchini threatening to slither onto the catwalk every time he opened his door.
