Starship thrive, p.4
Starship Thrive, page 4
part #4 of Thrive Space Colony Series
Eli chuckled silently. He hadn’t found it nearly as funny when he started growing bakkra on his skin. Dr. Tyler’s medical diagnostics only reported internal parasites. Denali took skin bakkra for granted, wholly integral to their culture. The lavender and peach ones even bestowed mild euphoria and pleasant hallucinogenics.
Copeland fervently hoped to change the subject. “Never mind.. It’s good to see you! How’s everything back on the ship?”
Ben sank cross-legged on the almost-cool floor by his feet. The youth filled them in on the happenings shipboard. Cortez and Kassidy had cleared the fuel barrels from the engine room, and the kitchen garden was back in business. Sass’s return proved that she and Clay could simply flash-freeze themselves without bakkra boarding the ship. They still awaited Copeland and Eli to devise something suitable for the rest of the crew. Ben was sent – surprise! – to help accomplish that.
All of them were waiting on Copeland to pull some rabbit or another out of a hat. He sighed. On his tablets at the moment was his research on Denali structural materials. They didn’t seem to produce much steel. Bamboo had many admirable properties, but not in ship construction. Yet Thrive wasn’t getting off this planet without a serious overhaul of her fueling system. Two crew, then three, worked their asses off in the engine room during the landing, and simply couldn’t keep up. The fuel needed to climb out of this gravity well could only be more ravenous.
Ben’s happy conclusion surprised him out of his dour review of his to-do list. “But most of all, I’m supposed to make sure you take a break, Cope. Captain’s orders.” He grinned. “We’re on vacation.”
“Vacation?” Cope echoed in disbelief. “We can’t even re-enter the Thrive until I rig a bio-lock.”
“Yeah, but Sass says it’s not urgent. She and Clay can go in and out now. And you deserve a break. So we play and work. You too, Eli.”
“Outstanding,” Eli breathed. He sat back to reconsider his tablets in a new light.
Copeland tried to picture not-working, and worst of all, trying to enjoy Waterfalls. In his experience, he needed the first 3 days of vacation just to mentally detach from his job. He loved his work. And there was so much of it to do. And now Sass decreed that his priorities could all wait for him to goof off? What the hell?
Aurora brought a stool for Ben and drew him up to his feet. Cope froze as she planted her hands on the gunner’s breasts and kissed him. “Welcome to Denali!”
“Huh,” Ben replied quellingly. “I mean, thanks.” His frown landed on Copeland.
“What? They do that. It’s annoying.”
“They seem very friendly,” Ben accused.
“Too friendly,” Cope and Eli both muttered.
Aurora ran a finger down Ben’s arm. “It’s important that you not emulate your shipmates. I think you could be beautifully patterned.”
Involuntarily, Ben’s eyes took in Aurora’s perky breasts and lovely batik-like pastel patterning. Bakkra infestations weren’t conducive to fine lines. But young men and women on the mating prowl made an effort to cultivate attractive if blobby markings.
“Like they did?” Ben demanded.
Cope desperately wished Aurora would get her hands off his… My what? Abel referred to the kid as his teddy bear. He felt a blush warm his face. No doubt Aurora read the glow. His reds brightened when his skin warmed.
“Your friends are not cooperative at all,” Aurora confided in Ben. “But you! You could be exquisite! Such a lovely personality.”
“How do you figure that?” Ben demanded. “I just got here.”
“Look,” she said, placing her hands on his chest again. “See how the pattern is taking?” Indeed, peach hand prints were developing across his pecs.
Hm, Copeland thought. Maybe the nurses got the message not to paw the Mahinans. His peachy finger whiskers were already growing pretty vivid by the time they met Aurora. Perhaps Ben had escaped groping til now. Oh. Togas. Ben learned to tie on a loincloth for toga day.
“May I show you the pleasure garden?” Aurora invited. “Give you the grand tour of the dome? Copeland won’t mind. Will you, Copeland?”
Copeland found that he minded very much indeed, and wanted to throttle the bitch. I have no claim on Ben. “Good to see you,” he managed to whisper. He didn’t meet Ben’s eyes, though.
“I’d love a tour,” Ben declared. “Show me everything. This pleasure garden, does it include ladies interested in…?”
“Of course!” Aurora purred in delight. “And they will eat you up!”
And she led him away.
Eli placed a hand on Copeland’s back. “You could have asked him to stay. You could still catch up and join him.”
But if a woman was what Ben wanted, who was Copeland to stop him? For himself, every girl he’d seen here made him wish he was home safe with Ben in their cabin.
He stood abruptly and spotted them walking away. What do I want? He hesitated.
Eli sighed and settled back to his tiny table. “Go. Give him a choice.”
“What?”
“Go now,” Eli clarified. “I’ll explain later.”
Still unsure he was doing the right thing, Copeland started walking to catch up with them. After a few hesitant steps, he broke into a limping trot.
A few hours later, propped on cushions in the pleasure garden, Ben finally persuaded Aurora to go check on Eli. He smiled after her until she disappeared behind a potted hedge. “That woman is very annoying.”
Copeland sighed, flat on his back beside him. Though not too close. Sharing body heat was contraindicated.
It’s rego hot in here. And this is winter!
“Just wait until you’re fully painted,” Copeland advised. “She’ll start reading your mind.”
“Kind of amazing,” Ben mused. “I’ve never been so turned off by naked bodies.”
“Yeah?” Cope asked. Was that hopefully?
Ben shook his head, groping for how to explain it. “They seem as alien as the wildlife. More so. I don’t expect to connect to a rubber plant, or a pterodactyl. But these people – I have no idea whether I’m connecting? Offending? Flirting? I don’t understand what they want from me. Like smoke signals, kilometers apart, but the breeze keeps smudging it away.”
“Exactly.” After a brief lapse into silence, Cope added, “Hey. It’s really good to see you again. Missed you.”
Ben chuckled. “I know, right? We’ve been in each other’s back pocket for half a year. The past few days, it’s like I kept turning around to tell you something. But you weren’t there. Dad sends his love. And Nico.”
“Don’t,” Cope said abruptly. “We always talk about them.” He rolled onto his belly, then propped himself up on his arms to catch an air current.
“You’d rather talk about us?” Ben challenged him. Cope never wanted to talk about their relationship. Anything personal was a hard slog.
Ben picked out another sweet potato noodle from their bowl and slurped it. Mahina had printed soy protein. Sagamore featured fish paste and rice. Denali’s world cuisine revolved around sweet potatoes, morning, noon, and night, the productivity king of starchy vegetables. They grew well here during the warm winter. Summer was too hot to grow anything.
Cope surprised him. “Yeah, I want to talk about us.”
Ben’s eyebrows rose. He dared not respond for fear of startling the shy creature before him.
Cope continued haltingly. “I don’t want anyone else. I’d be OK promising that forever. But that’s because I…”
As the pause grew long, Ben prompted, “Because you… Don’t want anyone? Like physically.”
“I don’t know.” Cope gulped.
Ben scooted over to lay alongside him. This was evidently acceptable manners in the garden, though he hadn’t seen anyone humping yet. He suspected lovers met here, then found somewhere more private to close the deal.
“Careful, my angry might rub off on you,” the engineer warned.
“Hasn’t yet,” Ben quipped. “No matter how hard you try. John Copeland?”
“Yeah?”
Ben leaned to whisper in his ear. “I’m not an angry person.” Experimentally, he kissed the ear. “And I can out-wait you. Forever.” He pulled back to let the breeze flow between them again.
“Deal,” Cope replied. Ben had never seen such a sweet unguarded smile on him. The glow spread slowly and transformed him.
“Wait, what did we just agree to?” Ben broke out laughing.
6
From Thrive’s bridge, Sergeant Wilder shot yet another twitching pterry. Goody, I finally have a job to do, he thought.
For months on end, the Thrive’s security chief had scant occupation aside from keeping in great shape. His billet job was salad prep working for Jules, the 16-year-old housekeeper.
And occasionally he beat the crap out of Copeland. The engineer volunteered to dance now and then, for anger management. Wilder grinned wryly. The only time the settler ever beat him in a fight, Wilder let him. A stretch like Cope was no match for a highly trained urb like himself.
Security wasn’t an issue in deep space.
Wilder couldn’t complain. Living on the Thrive beat hell out of exile to Mahina Orbital. The sergeant especially resented the station’s new CO. How could he know turning her down for sex would have consequences? Vindictive bitch. Not that life on the orbital hadn’t been repulsive in every way.
Speaking of repulsive, the number of pterry corpses in their parking lot was growing excessive. A dead green-speckled monster – they called it a rhino – was lying across their sonic perimeter, too.
He needed to get rid of some carcasses. He could call the hunters again. He sighed. He did not approve of relying on Zan’s merry band to manage his yard. He’d far rather be out there himself with a gun. But what could he do? Until Sass’s pet engineer coughed up a bio-lock he couldn’t leave the –
Wilder grinned at a sudden thought. It wasn’t like he and Cortez, his lover and guard subordinate, needed to man the guns all the time. The sonics did their job well enough. The guard duo just popped up here once an hour or so to euthanize anything still wiggling.
“Cortez?” he commed her. “Busy?”
“Not especially. Ice wands.”
Wilder snorted amusement. Jules’ teen arts and crafts project of the day was making stylish ice wands to sell to the natives. With Copeland goofing off in the city, Cortez hated working for Jules. “Great! Meet me in the hold!”
“This is awesome!” Cortez clambered into the shuttle’s second seat, and quickly familiarized herself with the gun controls and grapples. “This isn’t much different than the MA cruisers back home.”
She and Wilder both worked for Mahina Actual Security, the citadel police force, before falling from grace and getting exiled to orbit. The younger sarge, with his winning personality, was more successful than her at earning promotions. But she mastered the technical skills well enough.
“You sure you know how to drive this thing?” she asked.
Wilder scoffed. “Never met a flyer I didn’t love!” He peered at the pilot control panel more closely. “If I could just figure out – Ah. The eject button.” He grinned at her.
Something about that boyish expression inspired her to inquire, “Did you ask the captain’s permission?”
“I’m head of security. Acting on my own initiative.”
“Such a boy.”
Wilder sighed. “Fine, fine…” He flicked his comm. “Sass, Wilder. Cortez and I are taking out the shuttle to rearrange the corpses. Alright by you?”
“Uh – sure! Excellent idea, sergeant,” Sass confirmed. “You know how to fly it?”
“We both do, captain.”
“Don’t hit the eject button,” she warned. “That ejects your seat from the shuttle. What you need is the green release lever under the stick to undock you from the ship. Maybe I should come with you.”
“I’m sure I’ll figure it out, cap,” Wilder drawled.
Cortez recognized the male resistance to directions when she heard it. She pointed to the thrusters on the panel in front of him. If they didn’t have attitude control before he released the lock –
“Stay below 90 meters,” Sass warned, “and give the side fences a good leeway as well. Those sonic barriers zap hard.”
“Sar. Wilder out.”
Cortez back-handed him lightly. “She’s a good boss. You’re rude, Isfahan.”
“Yes, Dina.”
She hated her first name as much as he did. “Get the thrusters on before we undock or –”
Wilder released the clamps. As she expected, Thrive’s clamps released its little rider with a nudge which in space would have pushed the shuttle outward at a snail’s pace to clear the parking nook. In a 1.1 g gravity field, instead it nudged the shuttle to roll and spill out. Cortez managed to stab the thrusters alive before the flyer was totally upside-down. Wilder hadn’t enabled the artificial gravity in here, so she was hanging from her seat harness.
Laughing in delight, Wilder completed the sideways roll and came out straight. “That was fun!”
“Don’t break the toy,” she growled back. Unlike her feckless lover, she’d endured Sass’s punishment for ship-damaging idiocy before. Sass didn’t yell. The captain favored an intense guilt trip and treating the miscreant as a dim-witted two-year-old. The chief engineer’s pound of flesh was even worse. Not an experience Cortez cared to repeat.
“Pterries, Cortez,” Wilder retorted. “Keep your eye on the ball.”
That was difficult to do as Wilder zipped a few laps around the 100-meter cube to get a feel for his range and controls. He was flying by display only. Cortez flicked on the night vision on the window so she could see the greenish trees, ground, containers, and mother ship whipping by.
“Thought we could pile the pterries in that corner,” Wilder suggested, his pointed finger shifting as they flashed past it.
“No.” Cortez back-handed him again. “Effing calm down! Park over the middle. Sheesh.”
She rocked to his abrupt stop 90 meters up, over the precise center of the lot. He really did fly well.
“Here, Mom?”
“We can’t pile them in a corner because the sonic poles are there,” she explained. “We need a pile in an open spot so we can torch them.”
“Point,” he conceded. “Hey, can you grab the rhino with the grapples?”
She studied her console, and the rhino. She commed Sass to ask, then transferred to Abel, who used the shuttle more often to pick up cargo. They needed to get within 3 meters of the carcass. But if they tipped the shuttle just so at dead slow, and violated the sonic margin… “Got you, sucker!”
“Wait,” Wilder interrupted her. “Can you push with the grapples? Like shove it out the barrier?”
“Maybe. We won’t be able to grab it again, though.”
“Try it,” he insisted.
“Get us half a meter closer,” she directed. Then she set the grapples to shove at maximum.
The barrel-shaped beast didn’t clear the sonic field. But it did move far enough to excite the neighborhood. As Wilder drew the vehicle back to a healthier margin, and reoriented to face the rhino, the forest began to thrash. He turned on the front spotlight to watch the show. First a few speedy cat-sized creatures darted in to grab a literal pound of flesh. Then came a couple slower armored creatures. Those nosed under the dead beast and hunkered down to feed. These all appeared clever enough to avoid the sonic boundary.
Cortez turned on the external aural pickups. Mostly they heard the crash of plants and leaves.
Then the first big monster arrived, 4 meters tall at his central hump, bending trees nearly in two as it edged in. Also heavily armored, this guy clipped his tail on the sonics and went berserk. Now the armored critters dug out and fled in panic.
Cortez tuned a dial on the sound, translating first higher, then lower sounds into the human aural range. Sure enough, ‘humper’ was bellowing in outrage at a wavelength too low for human ears. “And that’s why the hunters wear earphones,” she hazarded.
“Kind of a mish-mash, aren’t they?” Wilder returned. “Like the ages of dinosaurs and mammals all mixed together.” Naturally, the youth of Mahina Actual studied Earth’s natural history more than its politics. Science was relevant to the city’s terraforming mission. He pointed toward a shoulder-high striped one that suddenly puffed out its – feathers? – on end and grew twice as wide. Something sprayed out from underneath. Another mid-size monster recoiled and bit at a third creature, despite having been deeply engaged in feeding on the rhino just then. Between camouflage, flailing tails, feathers, crests, claws, teeth, flashing eyes and flying gore, with half a dozen diners elbowing in to the feast, it was getting hard to track individual monsters.
A higher-pitched bellowing approached. Several of the mid-sized creatures flattened, then hastily slunk away in panic. “This should be good,” Cortez murmured, entranced. Wilder adjusted the shuttle backward another few meters.
A 10-meter-tall demon broke out of the woods. It toppled a tree across the sonic boundary. Wilder’s quick reflexes just barely escaped the shuttle getting clipped by its heavy fern-tipped boughs. “Giraffe-osaurus Rex!” he dubbed the latest critter in satisfaction. “He’s got to be the apex predator.”
“Does he?” Cortez argued. “That neck doesn’t look very strong. Oh, crap. It’s climbing on the tree!” A dog-sized speedy-tier beast nimbly danced through the fallen branches, apparently insulated from the sonic barrier. “Back out!”
While Wilder hastily extracted them from the spot, Cortez shot the dog-alike with the shuttle’s laser. Then she called in the heavy artillery. While the shuttle cowered in a corner, Sass torched the fallen tree from Thrive’s bridge using the rock-cutters.
“You two are having entirely too much fun out there,” the captain opined. “Learn anything?”
“The wildlife is a blast!” Cortez assured her. “Wish we could go out with the hunters.”
