Starship thrive, p.1
Starship Thrive, page 1
part #4 of Thrive Space Colony Series
Starship Thrive
Thrive Space Colony Adventures Book 4
Ginger Booth
Copyright © 2019 Ginger Booth
All rights reserved.
Cover design by www.rafidodigitalart.com
Skyship image © Freestyleimages | Dreamstime.com
Diagram by Ginger Booth
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Maps
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Author Note
Also by Ginger Booth
Acknowledgments
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Prologue
Launched on a shoestring,
The colonists were humanity’s only hope for survival.
But they’re failing in the Aloha star system.
Denali holds two prizes of inestimable value.
A true starship at the bottom of the ocean.
And the greatest nanite scientist in the system.
Too bad Thrive is stuck here.
Maps
Thrive floorplan.
1
Captain Sass Collier eagerly stabbed her comms button the moment her ship set down their containers, her hand trembling from the strain of the past few hours. “Waterfalls, this is Thrive. We’re down!”
Her gunner Ben Acosta shot down yet another pseudo-pterodactyl – pterry for short. “And we’re ever so eager for interdiction,” he muttered.
Poor Ben. He’d never seen wild animals before. He hated having to kill them.
“Thrive, your sonics are live – now,” Zan replied, spokesman for their new hosts here at the domed habitat of Waterfalls. Or at least, Zan led the hunters who held the hostile wildlife perimeter, while Thrive carved itself a parking lot in the riotous jungle. “Remember, do not fly your ship through the sonics. You won’t enjoy it. You’d probably pass out and crash your ship into a dome, killing thousands.”
Worth avoiding, Sass conceded. “Understood, Waterfalls.”
Though Sass was pretty sure she didn’t understand much about how things worked on the planet Denali. They just got here.
She kept the ship hovering to see how effective these ‘sonics’ were. They did seem to keep the monsters on the periphery at bay. But while they were still maneuvering, Zan needed to keep the overhead barrier turned off. He told her to let him know as soon as she was ready to stay below 100 meters. That was an hour ago.
Their hectare of infant spaceport still steamed from Sass burning off the forest, and Ben’s attempts to carve rock and level the site. This wasn’t entirely possible. But their 100 x 100 meter foothold on a new planet now featured one step broad and level enough to park their 4 shipping containers, and a larger shelf for the ship, itself 45 meters long. If the rest of the site was rough sloping ground, well, Ben had performed near-miracles for such quick work.
A pterry dropped to the ground right where Sass intended to park. The beast lay there, one 5-meter wing extended, the other curled to its body, wracked with seizures.
“Aw…” Ben moaned beside her.
“Sorry, Ben,” she murmured. She danced the Thrive, flying on-end like a dolphin prancing on water with its tail flukes, to direct her engine output to incinerate the still-twitching monster. The engines were giving all they had just to keep Thrive in the air in this unfamiliar 1.1 g gravity well. She couldn’t even fly the ship level as they would back home among the low-gravity moons and rings of the gas giant Pono. Back where we belong, she tried not to think.
She cremated one more twitching fallen pterry with one of the high-power rock guns, and sat back a moment. Well, certainly none of the approaching monsters were healthy anymore. However, using a landscaping laser on a piece of empty ground was one thing. If a pterry carcass landed on the ship or their precious cargo, she couldn’t very well blast it to cinders in situ.
She inquired, “Waterfalls, do these birds ever recover after passing through the sonic barrier?”
“Not very often,” Zan replied over the comms.
“Meaning? Like, once a year they destroy a dome?”
“Oh, no! Hunters can shoot them down, of course. But normally they’re eager to escape. They fly straight back into the sonics. Over and over again until they die. So, problem solved. The sonics are effective. You can set down anytime now. Will that be soon?” Zan and his crew had been covering their arrival from the jungle for hours, plus whatever time it took them to install the beacons and erect the sonic barriers.
“Probably. Thrive out.” She turned first to Ben, then consulted her first mate Abel and engineer Copeland in the hold. Nerves jangling with adrenaline from the hell-ride down from orbit, and battling the wildlife, she should be eager to simply set the ship down and be done with it.
Except she wasn’t sure the Thrive would ever lift again.
Ben drew a quick diagram on the display between them. “Park there. Captain, the fueling crew is exhausted.” The youth, just turned 21 on the voyage here, offered a compassionate sad smile. He understood her reluctance.
“Right. Let’s do this.” She danced her dolphin to one end of Ben’s suggested bed, sort of diagonal on the lower end of the lot. She swiveled so the landing struts pointed somewhat downward, and cut in their bottom thrusters to maximum while she lowered the engines within a few meters of the fused rock and soil below. She’d burn a pool of lava beneath them if she kept this up. She eased off the power to the engines and –
THWACK! The ship bounced forward onto its landing struts. No amount of inertial dampeners or internal gravity could cancel out that sudden lurch to the ground. “I hope I didn’t break anything.”
Ben’s chuckle beside her held only a tinge of hysteria at first. In a moment, they both cracked up, Sass with tears squeezing out of her eyes.
As they calmed down, she realized she was not engendering confidence. She sighed. “I apologize, Mr. Acosta. That was unprofessional of me. Too much adrenaline.”
He shrugged, and continued on to stretch his neck. Like hers, it was probably in knots from the hours-long battle to land safely. “With respect, Sass, you’re the only captain I’ve ever known. And I felt the same way.” He leaned forward and turned the external flood lights onto the polar winter night. One quadrant remained dark, its lamp likely a pterodactyl casualty.
They hadn’t exactly been flying blind. But the blinding chaotic lights of out-gassing engine and rock-cutting laser, during frenetic maneuvers, hardly provided a calm, reasoned view of their new surroundings. The impenetrable forest loomed 30 meters high downslope and like a wall into darkness upslope. Greens dominated, in every imaginable shade. But even in the forest canopy, strong elements of red, purple, and white suggested whole trees of those mingled colors. Small splotches of further brilliant colors burst out of the undergrowth. Their new pocket spaceport, blackened browns, steamed in the rain from their efforts to cauterize it.
“Thrive, Waterfalls,” Zan interrupted her marveling gaze. “Please turn the lights off. They agitate the wildlife.”
“Oh! Sorry.”
Ben doused the lights for her.
“No worries,” Zan assured her. “But the selectmen are expecting you this afternoon. Is that still the plan? We should go soon. The bio-locks will take a few hours, to enter the dome. Can we fetch you in half an hour?”
“Yes. Thank you. I’ll get my team together.” She signed off. “Ben, you’re on break.”
As the final act of their grueling landing festivities, the ship’s engineer John Copeland cut power to Thrive’s gravity. He shuffled aching feet as he settled in to weigh 10% extra for the foreseeable future.
Denali’s strong gravity wasn’t a new sensation. He worked out under 1.1 g, though not 1.2 g like the others. Copeland wasn’t a fully stretched-out sort of Mahina settler. But he’d let himself grow rangy as a teenager to fit in better with his peers, maybe 10-15 cm taller than he might have been. He had the weakest b ones of the crew, but he sheathed them in muscle to compensate.
He pumped up the ship’s internal pressure to match Denali’s, and he was done. Or rather, his work was never done. An endless stream of tasks awaited, starting with the fact that his engine room was full of fuel drums, most of them spent.
But he could take a break.
He flipped his podium-like display to the cameras and panned around to survey their tiny domain. Those trees looked nothing like the aspen and spruce of Mahina, nor the fruit trees Sass kept on board. The collage of colors and strange shapes defied his ability to interpret it. Now that they were on the ground, the sonic boundaries seemed effective at keeping the monsters at bay, though they prowled along the perimeter. Unfortunately, the flyers tended to get zapped and fall through, twitching.
“Hey, still working?” Ben asked, arriving to join him.
Cope threw his arms around his room-mate and hugged him close, overcome for a moment. He never fully believed they’d survive a landing. Their margin for error was that close. But Ben was OK. The ship still held air. Its life support systems remained online. And that was a rego miracle.
Abel quipped from his bench beneath the scrubber trees, “Public displays of affection now?”
Copeland hastily stepped back from his clutch, and shot a glower at the first mate. “Thought he might hold me upright. But he’s beat. Great job, buddy.”
Ben nodded a wry smile. “You too. Three. Everyone down here. Hell of a ride. So we’re headed into town? Drinks with the locals? Abel, you’re buying!”
The last thing Cope wanted was to exit the ship and walk into that midnight zoo of horrors. “Sure we don’t want to rest up? Hit the town tomorrow fresh.”
“Spoilsport!” Ben scoffed. “C’mon, it’ll be fun!”
Abel warned, “The locals expect an official meet and greet today.”
“They do indeed,” Sass called out, trotting down the stairs from the catwalk. “Abel, you’ve got the ship. You keep Ben. And fix that ankle of yours.” The first mate sprained it while helping untangle a snafu in the fueling operation on the way in.
Sass continued, “Copeland, you’re with me.” She cast him a bracing smile.
“Me!”
Sass nodded. “You. Eli. Clay and me. We’ll kick up our feet in this ‘bio-lock’ and relax for a couple hours.” She paused to digest his consternation. “Weren’t you just discussing that with the guys?”
“Uh, yeah.” He was trying to talk them out of it.
“Jules!” Abel called up to the galley. “Fix the captain a picnic, would you? Send along a few ice wands. For hosting gifts.”
2
For Eli Rasmussen, Ph.D., terraforming botanist, Denali was love at first sight. An entire planet, richly covered 100 meters deep in strange plants. Actual living rain poured from the sky. He tipped his faceplate back and marveled as the runnels streamed across.
Copeland suddenly grabbed his elbow, as Eli’s next footfall stretched 10 cm lower than he was expecting. Ben had done a heroic job clearing the terraces for their tiny new pocket spaceport, but the footing was treacherous between shelves. Irritated, Eli planned out his next half dozen steps, then lifted his eyes to the trees again.
If one could call them trees, and no doubt the locals did. Geometry, biochemistry, and physics decreed many of the basic facts of life, here as on old Earth. But where Earth primary producers favored radial or bilateral symmetry first, followed by fractal growth, Denali seemed to favor fractal forms all the way. The dominant plants tended towards fern and fan and spiral shapes. He was dying to know if the scarlet steps jutting from the thick corkscrew trunk ahead were a symbiotic organism. Its shape and texture expression, not to mention its colors, seemed to contrast with the towering pigtail it buttressed.
Copeland rapped his earmuff to catch his attention, and held him back. Oh, yes, the sonic boundary. Their guide demonstrated placing two shiny batons at waist height, across an imaginary threshold marked with corner daubs of yellow spray paint on the ground. One of his cronies on the outside, similarly dressed in baggy safari clothes with shoulder cannon, accepted the opposite ends of the batons. With gestures, the Thrive contingent was invited to walk the gauntlet.
Sass wore their only earmuff-and-breath-mask ensemble that came complete with comms. Other than the headgear, they wore their usual clothing from the ship, no pressure suits. Considering that they were all sopping wet, they were remarkably warm. Amazing.
Cope jabbed him in the back to propel him through the baton gateway. Eli hadn’t paid attention when Sass and Clay went through. When he crossed the threshold, the boom! caught him by surprise. The deep bass sonics seemed to travel up his bones, and loosen his leg joints. He pitched forward onto his hands and knees on the fused rock, his feet still inside the thrumming sound field. The batons and earmuffs clearly dampened the barrier so they could cross, but didn’t cancel it.
Cope stepped over him, then dragged him another meter, and offered him a hand up. Their guides plainly thought this was hilarious.
Grease paint, Eli decided. The black sockets drawn around their eyes, nostrils and mouth must be grease paint of some kind. The pair of men appeared to be hairless, from crown to brow to bare fore-arms. Every part that wasn’t painted black was covered with vivid whorls and stripes of other colors, a few pastel and iridescent, but mostly bold reds and golds. Is that camouflage or war paint?
They left the batons stuck in the mud near one of the markers. A few steps further, they entered a tunnel clearly fresh-hacked from the understory. Eli still felt his feet and leg bones thrumming. Sonic path, milder. Their lean but squat guides kept their massive guns slung across their backs in unconcern. One held up a short green glowing wand to light the way. Chemical light. This brushed the ceiling of their leafy tunnel. Eli’s head almost grazed it as well. Copeland and Clay, both taller, hunched down rather than let the alien plants touch them. That’s a lost cause.
They stepped down a series of radial tree roots as the path curved right. Glancing back, Eli couldn’t even see a glow from the Thrive anymore, though they’d barely come 100 meters from the landing pad. His appreciation for the density of this forest rose a notch.
A couple hundred meters later, continuing downhill, they reached a dim geodesic dome roof. It reached only to waist height on him and dropped off to either side. Apparently they approached this dome from a bluff above its main level. They performed the now-familiar baton routine again, then popped a hatch to clamber in.
A spiral staircase in the airlock took them down a level. The guides bid them wait, and cycled the air. Just as on the Thrive, a red light turned green. And their guides pulled off their air-and-ears headwear, boots, and every stitch of clothing.
Their ears and other orifices featured the same black paint.
Their main guide, Zan, demonstrated how to feed the face plates, ear muffs, air tanks, clothes, personal electronics, and picnic basket into apertures in the wall, each hole clearly marked with pictographs of what to stuff where.
Eli pursed his lips in disapproval. Like settler towns back home, a question mark button offered the user further verbal explanation, or perhaps help. Signage for the illiterate.
