Sentient Thrive (Thrive Space Colony Adventures) Read online

  “No,” Sass breathed in exhaustion. “What do you need?”

  “What’s the system here? All these people. Where is Clay supposed to land?”

  “Oh, hell. Um, Ben took care of that.”

  “Want to flip a coin?” Abel prompted sarcastically.

  “Great and minor gremlins, Abel. I had no idea how much crap Ben coordinated each time we flew into Mahina. Tarana’s going mental. Me too. The spaceport’s telling us we need to man the decontamination showers ourselves. We brought in 800 more people than usual, and there’s no housing for them. The hospitals are full. Schuyler City just demanded we take off again and grab icebergs, or they can’t provide water to the ships. We’re low on fuel. And Kassidy claims she can’t quash the story about Ben’s nervous breakdown. She demands immediate access to Ben to spin his side –”

  Abel interrupted. “You can’t let her do that. He’s not here, is he?”

  “No, of course not! I sent Cope and Ben home on a shuttle. I tried to get Cope to bring him to a hospital. But Cope wanted to wait for the drugs to wear off, and then talk to him first.”

  Abel sided with Cope on that score, emphatically. But no need to argue the point with Sass. “So who runs the Spaceways ground game on this end?”

  “Ben.”

  “And the fuel and water and…”

  “Ben.”

  Abel pinched the bridge of his nose. “Probably aided by the president, Cope.”

  “I can’t drag him away from Ben now.”

  “Sunset. Drinks. My ramp or yours?”

  “I –” Sass hesitated, then conceded, “A drink would be good.”

  “See you in a couple minutes. My place.”

  While he waited, Abel first dispatched one of his crewmen to set out picnic chairs, ice wand, and a bucket of beers. Then he reached out to the crews of several other ships to go find some orange cones or something, and start chasing immigrants out of the remaining landing pads. Mercifully, the weekday heat was abating. And in any case, Schuyler was way cooler than Waterfalls. The Denali could simply sit down and await…water. He reached Darren Markley, their top engineer on site at the moment, and asked him to figure out how to give these people a drink. That would help lure Denali out of the ship landing zone, and prevent them from wandering off into the city before decontamination. And why wouldn’t they? No one ever built a fence around the spaceport.

  That attended to, Abel sat in a newly erected lawn chair, and cracked open a beer. That first gulp tasted great. He sighed, and spotted Sass’s bright blond hair headed his way. I have time for one more comm call.

  “Kassidy, Abel. We need a welcoming committee at the spaceport.”

  She countered, “How long did you think I could keep that up? Four months, Abel. You’re old news, and worse. The settler on the street is starting to resent all these newcomers. Denali manners suck. They’re stronger, think they’re smarter than us, and there’s so damned many of them. And oh, good job, you brought in a bumper crop, and no water for them to drink. Ben snags an iceberg.”

  “I caught that part,” Abel agreed. “But I know this beautiful, brilliant lady who can perform public relations miracles. What was her name…”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere. I told Sass. I need to play the sympathy card with Ben. Our home-town hero, the boy from Poldark, fallen –”

  “He’s asleep, Kassidy. Drugged to the gills. You want to interview Cope? He’ll bite your head off.”

  Kassidy snorted amusement. “No. Fun to picture, though, Cope’s remarks to his homeworld. ‘You lazy stretch morons!’ Probably wouldn’t help. But you cheered me up. Hey, isn’t he president of Spaceways?”

  “Probably wouldn’t help,” Abel reinforced. “The guy’s mind is on his husband, Kassidy. Cut him a break.”

  Sass arrived and collapsed to a striped chair, with an oof and a sigh. She reached limply toward the beer bucket. Her hand fell a half meter short. Abel tossed a bottle to her, and put the conversation with Kassidy on speaker.

  Sass laughed and sprayed the beer foam at the spaceport dust. A hard-top surface lurked beneath all that dust, really. The ground crew even ran sweepers across the expanse once a week, or so they claimed. But aside from being preternaturally flat, the spaceport masqueraded as just another expanse of bare moon regolith.

  Abel concluded, “I have every confidence in your creativity, Kassidy. Hey, are you here filming? Drinks are on me. Ramp, Friendship Thrive. Sass just arrived. Come join us.”

  He disconnected, and noted that orange cones were now popping out across the dust scape. Slightly fewer dazed Denali stood where a giant transport was soon to descend to crush them like a bug. Good enough for now.

  No it wasn’t. He took another swig of beer, and pursed his lips.

  “You can’t blame him,” Sass attempted. “The evacuation has been grueling for all of us. Maximum effort to save maximum lives. Ben took on too much. He didn’t have time to develop a ground game here, and run the fleet, and find fuel and supplies, and fly his own missions.”

  “Not him I’m blaming,” Abel countered. “What exactly is a fleet captain supposed to do? Fly ships, ensure personnel are competent, train captains, coordinate schedules.”

  “Can’t fly without fuel,” Sass pointed out. “Our burn rate is stunning. Denali’s gravity well is voracious, and so’s the warp. I’m surprised there’s any fuel left in the Aloha system.”

  Abel checked that point on his comm. “Not sure there is.”

  “Yet he kept buying it,” Sass countered. “Somehow.”

  Abel checked the company finances next, and winced at the magnitude of their credit extension. “I had no idea. But no. It’s Cope I want to strangle.”

  “Cope?”

  “The President of Thrive Spaceways. John Copeland. Yes, Cope. Who let his husband work himself into a nervous breakdown instead of carrying his weight. If he’s kicking himself at Ben’s bedside, good! He deserves it! Sass, we nearly lost Ben, Hopeful Thrive, and a thousand Denali souls today.”

  “You think I don’t know that!? I was there, Abel, just like you!”

  He raised a placating hand. “Not my point. It’s a rego miracle we managed to save all of them. And you’re to thank for that.”

  “And you,” Sass assured him. “And Cope, too. We did fantastic work today. It’s a miracle we saved Hopeful.”

  “Yeah.” He licked his lip, and pointed at the dazed herd still drifting where Clay needed to park Thrive One. “I think it’s time to shut this party down. The evacuation.”

  Sass took a long pull on her beer. “This is your first time on the Schuyler end, Abel. It’s always a circus. And we carried four and a half thousand this time, the most ever. It’ll take a little longer than usual to process them all through.” Her jaw skewed sideways, though.

  “It’s going to be a disaster today,” Abel differed. “Extra hours in processing on the spaceport, equals higher death rates. Plus a public relations nightmare over Ben’s near-fatal breakdown. Schuyler city services are a complete no-show. And from what Kassidy’s telling me, we’re losing the public will to accept more immigrants.”

  Sass dropped her head and toyed with her beer label. “We’re only halfway there. Forty thousand Denali left to go?”

  “I’m aware of that,” Abel replied, voice controlled to a growl. “I ran the Denali end. Remember?”

  “And you did an awesome job,” Sass agreed faintly.

  “It’s autumn in Waterfalls,” Abel reminded her. “They can hang on through the winter. And all these immigrants need to eat. I say we shut down the evacuation for a while, give everyone a long rest. Let the Denali plant their winter harvest. While we solve the Mahina ground game. Now, are you up for icebergs today? Or me?”

  “Well, one of us needs to deal with this.” Sass’s limp wave encompassed the dusty spaceport. “On second thought, we’re not doing much good here, are we?”

  “We’re having a beer,” Abel pointed out. “I’m exhausted. You’re
exhausted. It’s sunset. Close enough.” It was still an hour shy of the official happy hour. But a good businessman lubricated a tough discussion no matter the day or hour. “Have you spoken to Hunter Burke?”

  Clay’s son was their usual fallback on negotiations with the Mahina government, such as it was. Mahina starved its public authorities for tax income, and the assorted petty fiefdoms that resulted rarely cooperated with each other. But the world sure needed them now. Like the creche mess all over again.

  “Hunter isn’t returning my calls,” Sass admitted. “But I thought, you’re the business guy. You’d arrive and get this show ship-shape. Right?”

  “Wrong,” Abel told her. “Business, yes. Sass, ain’t nothing business about this crazy operation. Not a cent of profit to be found. We can’t even…” He glanced guiltily over his shoulder, and lowered his voice. “We can’t make payroll. And our people deserve beer money!”

  “I’ll pitch in –”

  “You’ve paid. I’ve paid. It ends now. Sass, you know me. I got no use for big government. But this operation is crying out for rego public funding and bureaucracy. We can’t just dump sick refugees on the regolith and call them ‘saved.’ Social services need to step up. Yeah, the Denali evacuation is now officially on hold. Thrive Spaceways is on vacation. Until we get our act together.”

  Sass blinked dolefully at the scene. “Does it really look that bad to you? Like we’ve done such a lousy job on this end? There really were cheering crowds, Abel. At first.”

  “Yep. And then it got hard. Always does.” He took another swig. “I’ll grab the icebergs. Jules isn’t free for another 48 hours or so anyway. Is she.”

  “No,” Sass agreed. “I’ll grab some ice, too. Once Clay lands. I don’t even know where to put it.”

  “Because Ben managed all that. Personally. On behalf of an entire world.” She shot him a glower, but Abel held up a peaceable hand. “I’m kicking myself, Sass, not him. I thought Cope solved this by hiring Tarana to help Ben. Bet Cope thought so, too! Problem is, Ben’s too damned good at what he does. We didn’t realize how much was on his plate.” He pinched thumb and forefinger together. “So we came this close to losing him. With a thousand innocent bystanders. And a ship. That’s unacceptable.”

  “Do you have authority to shut down the evacuation?”

  “Temporary hold. Yes. I can do that. And I have. Understood, captain?”

  She considered for a moment, fatigue slowing her mental gears. “Agreed. We could use a break.”

  “I’ll inform Cope,” Abel assured her. “And Denali. And the Mahina authorities if I can collar one to notify. I’m not asking, I’m telling. Ah, here’s our official mouthpiece now.” He pointed out Kassidy’s long black curls, bouncing toward them at a trot. “She’ll make it sound good. God knows how. But she always does.”

  3

  Official sunset happy hour was long gone when chief engineer Remi Roy reached a bar in Saggytown. He hated the derogatory nickname for the Sagamore expatriate district in Schuyler. But it offered a touch of home.

  Remi had overcome his agoraphobia by now, that terror of the dome-bred when crossing the vast open spaces of the city’s spaceport and plazas. Though somehow he never adjusted to the colors of Mahina. Just after sunset, the city glowed an unnerving olive, as heat beat up in waves from the pavement and ruffled the tiger stripes on the immense half-Pono dominating the sky.

  He swung into his favorite joint, the only one that catered to his class of Saggy. Sort of. His adoptive caste anyway – like the pirate Pierre Lavelle, Remi was born an aristocrat. Which wasn’t nearly as impressive as it sounded. His elder brother inherited the family dome, and then lost it. As a younger son, the engineer never had prospects beyond a good education and a genteel descent into the middle class.

  He’d blown even that chance by joining the revolution. So he joined the middle class on Hell’s Bells instead of Sagamore. Then he pared a decade off his personal timeline to accompany Sass Collier to Sanctuary. By now he didn’t fit anywhere.

  But hey, at least they spoke his native tongue here. He ordered a beer and begged the bartender to converse with him for a few minutes, remind him what French sounded like. Laughing, the keep welcomed him home to Sagamore in exile. He claimed the rice and tilapia were delicious today, and the news a clown show. Was Remi in that mess with Thrive Spaceways?

  He hadn’t thought to catch the news. He brought his beer to an open table behind the clutch of people gazing at a wall-sized display. A news reporter lady, not their friendly Kassidy Yang, stood in the middle of the spaceport.

  “Over forty-five hundred more Denali refugees arrived today. Where is Thrive Spaceways? Where are the authorities? Who’s taking responsibility for this? The Schuyler reservoir is so low, the power authority warns of brownouts by Monday –”

  Remi blinked. No, that made sense. He kept forgetting this city used its reservoir as a battery for renewable power. All 3.5 sunny days, plus the erratic contribution of windmills, they pumped water to the high reservoir. Then they poured it over generator turbines to power the city over the 3.5 ‘day’ night. The first two days of that were weekend, Saturday and Glow. But the factories wanted power again by Monday.

  “– Captain Ben Acosta had a sudden nervous breakdown in the middle of takeoff from Denali. His ship carried a thousand immigrants. And no copilot.” The woman skewered the audience with an accusing look.

  “Imbecile!” cried a man in front of Remi.

  “Watch it,” Remi growled in French. “She doesn’t say what an incredible job we did, saving those people! You think it’s easy? Ben had just squirted out between two hurricanes, ten thousand meters above an ocean, halfway up, no way to land, no way to make orbit, blacking out. We were heroes, the ones who talked him through and saved that ship!”

  One of the guys, Carver Cartwright, reached up and switched off the sound, letting the others read the English subtitles if they felt like it. “Look who it is! Le Roy! You were in this merde show?”

  “Yeah, just landed. Hell of a trip.”

  “Drinks on me,” Carver told him. “For all of you worthy gentlemen! Garçon!” He turned back and clapped Remi on the shoulder with a smile. “Hero! Thirsty work!” Carver was an anglophone, of course – half of Sagamore spoke English as a first language. But nearly everyone was bilingual. Sag etiquette called for each man to speak his own fluency and trust the other to understand him.

  “Damn straight,” Remi agreed in French. Francophones were less polite, the aristocrats downright rude. But Hell’s Bells pounded the engineer’s mouth cleaner. He shook his head in dismay. “Are we really so unpopular here? Spaceways and the evacuation?”

  Carver shrugged. A new-made man, he arrived on Hell’s Bells and continued to Mahina during Remi’s lost decade. The engineer vaguely recalled he was in shipping too, finished goods for small operators. Of their class, there were about 700 Sag on Mahina, with their families. Plus over 4,000 freed paddy slaves who served them here in Saggytown, of course. Carver was an odd duck. Word was that his whole paddy slave troupe remained intact. When Lavelle came to liberate his little dome, Carver insisted he had no future except with his slaves, and chose ‘liberation’ right along with them. He married one, and had some young children here in the Saggytown mini-creche.

  Remi’s jaw clenched at the thought. Someday, he’d have to figure out how to do that, acquire a wife and kids.

  Carver answered the question forthrightly. “We have fifteen thousand Sag here now. Congratulations, Spaceways, the Denali now outnumber us!” He clinked his bottle to Remi’s. “Not entirely popular with the Sag, no. Pushy folk, Denali.”

  Remi barked a laugh. “Try working with them! Arrogant as hell.”

  Carver smiled. He did that a lot, a smooth talker, no surprise he’d landed on his feet, possibly the wealthiest man in Saggytown. “Kassidy Yang broadcast a while ago to give Spaceways’ side of the story. Deeply impressed. Still, the fact remains. We have thousands of underedu
cated paddies.” Their kind took for granted that the freed slaves were their natural childlike charges forever. “And the Mahinans have their unfortunate stretches. And now Spaceways dumps tens of thousands of smart, strong-as-an-ox, skilled, educated, pushy workers into the mix. You can see how that leaves us Sag wondering how to protect our people.”

  “Protect them? From what?” Remi leaned forward on his elbows. “Do the pushy baldies want to steal the phosphate mine tunnels from our paddies? I don’t think so! Denali worship natural beauty.”

  As an ex-mine engineer, Remi appreciated the rough-hewn charm of the spent mine tunnels the paddies claimed for their farms. But the hairless Denali wouldn’t be caught dead there. Well, the Denali city of Hermitage was mostly carved into a mountain. Judging from Quire, the Denali gardener Ben kept on staff, Hermits were gonzo for beauty as well. But the Hermits insisted they would stay and die on their world.

  They wouldn’t die fast. Underground and at high altitude, Hermitage wasn’t hurting as much from the Denali warming trend. Yet. Nor were they willing to expand and take in their unfortunate neighbors from broiling Waterfalls and roasting Denali Prime.

  Carver confided, “You’ve noticed a certain…casual approach to government on Mahina?”

  “What government?” Remi agreed. “Didn’t you create your own creche for Saggytown?”

  “That was a choice,” Carver explained. “We could send our children to the Mahina pre-schools. But our standards are so different. My eldest, he started this year at the Mahina school. Six years old, of course he’s already mastered reading, writing, and arithmetic, fluent in French and English. They skipped him straight to third grade.” He shook his head in dismay at Schuyler’s educational standards.

  “But about you! Are you still enjoying Spaceways? Or do you miss your own people?”

  “Little of both,” Remi confided. “Wouldn’t mind a little female companionship. Apparently the evacuation’s been called off. Unexpected R&R.”