Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4) (9 page)

“Not
the saucer leak, the increased amount of water absorbed by the air as the
temperature increases. We’re losing water faster than we anticipated.”

“So
we let it get cold enough to snow, and it falls out. No big deal.”

He
could hear Zeiss pacing and picture him gesturing with his hands. “We haven’t
been sitting on our thumbs up here, Lou. In case we don’t succeed at Oblivion,
we tried to come up with a plan to
refill
Sanctuary
.”

“I’m all ears.”

“To do that, we need between
twenty-one and twenty-five million cubic meters of water. At 1000 liters per
cubic meter, call it twenty-three billion liters. If we work ten hours a day on
Ascension
and extract and purify asteroid ice at the rate of 10,000
liters a day, we can refill in only two million days.”

“Ouch. I think we’ll run out of
fuel in the shuttle before then.”

“Anything
we try in order to increase the intake to appropriate levels will shift the
gravitational inflection points in the system close enough to the sun that we
might not be able to jump out.”

“Jeez.
Any other doomsday scenarios?”

“With
less water, it’s getting hotter inside the sphere faster than we thought.
Without Mercy’s help, the system is difficult to maintain.”

“Why
don’t you just do one of your famous computation trance thingies?”

“For
the same reason Red proposed the stasis chamber rules before Toby’s trial,”
Zeiss whispered. “Some time in the next three months, I might have a stroke. If
we go quantum, I will almost certainly blow. If that happens, they need to
freeze me in the first few minutes.”

“Damn,”
Lou said. “What if you make some excuse to travel to the landing bay? When you
come back through decontamination, the Magi devices will filter your blood and
whatnot. They could make you right as rain.”

“Maybe,
but what about the next emergency? The next time we have to compute in a hurry?
Those are happening more often. Sooner or later, one of us is going to require
the deep freeze.”

“Okay,
no more kids for me. I understand your reservations, but Mercy
needs
this medicine. Throw Auckland or Yvette into the mix, and let Red supervise
them. They could whip up a cure in a couple months. Then Mercy can help you
regulate the temperatures before winter, and no one knows about the mistake.”

“Perhaps,”
Zeiss allowed, “but you conveniently changed the subject away from your
labor-avoiding, beer-hall sessions.”

Lou
affected an Irish accent. “Well now, there are two parts to that answer. Do you
happen to have a cool jar of something lying around for a sorely abused man
who’s already parched from talking?”

Zeiss
replied, “Mira made some sun tea for me on the patio. If you’re nice to her,
maybe she’ll get you some.”

Lou
stood and wrapped an arm around the short pilot. “Red, I’m sorry I doubted you.
You know I’d take a bullet for you. I might even attend a meeting if I didn’t
have to wear shoes.”

She
sniffed. “You’re just trying to get rid of me to tell him something that would
piss me off.”

“I
can’t keep stopping to calm you,” Lou replied. “Z will tell you everything.
Those people in Garden Hollow are going stir crazy in this heat. We need to
give them something to do instead of gossip and complain.”

“All
right,” Red said, kissing her husband good-bye for the brief separation.

When
she was gone, Lou said, “The first thing you need to do is put Rachael Eliezer
in charge of something. If you don’t, she’s going to start a mutiny. In fact,
I’d put her in charge of the planetary beachhead committee.”

“There’s
no such committee.”

“There
should be. Weren’t you listening? Before I was in the space program, I would go
into remote villages and find out who the leading malcontents were so our
government could bribe them—either to overthrow their regime or stay loyal,
whichever side we were supporting that week.”

“The
Brits still do that sort of thing?”

“Please,
there are only about four countries in history that the empire hasn’t invaded,
and we have contingency plans for them,” Lou said, half-joking. “The difference
in this situation is that we don’t have billions of pounds, just important work
and titles. There need to be lots of new committees with plenty to do. We’ve
already discussed the water committee and the nanomedicine monitoring
committee. Those are doing our work. You need other projects like alien
language translation and page selection.”

“We
won’t need those for almost a year.”

“Ah,
but developing the tools and software for these can easily take a five-man team
even longer than the time available. The Magi should have a standard toolbox
for this stuff already if they do it as often as they claim, but we couldn’t
find any trace of one in Snowflake. I already put Sojiro to work on a basic
interface mock-up and collecting all the similar software we have available for
voice recognition. That man is like Michelangelo, wasted on all that painting.
Did you know Michelangelo was an architect, too? I have Yuki working on changes
to make the translator portable; she’s a whiz at signal processing. Our
programmers will teach the audio pick-up to parse sounds into words. From words,
we can make frequency charts and dictionaries. We can train it on every
available Earth language to prepare it for cracking the alien tongue.”

“A
Universal Translator?” asked Zeiss.

“No,
a toolkit to crack one language. I figure we can dope out a pidgin dictionary
with only 500 hours of recordings. I can handle the project requirements and
testing, but Pratibha would make an ideal manager. Giving her something
concrete to focus on will give everyone else room to breathe. However, to
actually get these recordings, you need Yuki’s good will. She holds a vital
link, but she’ll only volunteer it if she trusts you. I asked you to work out
with her for a reason.”

Zeiss
shook his head. “The last Mori woman I let work out with me was straddling me
naked when Red walked in. If you haven’t noticed, my wife holds a grudge.”

“Someone
can stay to protect your virtue. You need what Yuki has,” Lou said, thinking of
the bugs no one in the crew had been able to find. He was certain Yuki could
listen in on the dining hall at will.

“Can
you give me any hints?”

Lou
shook his head.
And have Red ripping your bedroom apart in paranoia?
“No. You have to act surprised. You’ll be able to trust her more if she’s the
one who spills it. If she doesn’t confess by the time we reach the goal, I’ll
shame it out of her.”

“Okay.
Yuki does need specialized hand-to-hand training, and I am the one most
qualified to provide it.”

“So
you like the language project?”

“I
should have thought of it,” Zeiss admitted.

“I
told the other two you had. That’s one of the things you’ve been planning in
your room all this time.”

“I
haven’t planned a thing.”

“People
won’t believe that. You’re always planning. We have to let just a little leak
out. I think we should make Risa head of the committee for the twenty-seven
ideas we want to give the natives of Oblivion. She had great ideas about
prerequisites and methods of selection.”

Zeiss
covered his face with his hand, muffling the groan slightly. “We can’t pick the
concepts the aliens need until we meet them, but what did you mean about
prerequisites?”

“Sonrisa
is great at telling what concepts come before others. When Yvette said law was
our most important idea, the engineer broke the most primitive example of law,
Hammurabi’s Code, down into a dozen components: literacy, stoneworking, an
alphabet, a numeric system, currency for the fines, a whole pyramid of
government concepts, basic if-then logic, and rudimentary anatomy. A lot of
pages devolve into these just like physics begins with the
six classical simple machines: the lever, wheel, pulley, and I forget
the rest. We can put some thinkers to work building the checklists of the
building blocks that we can use later. We need several because everyone I asked
had a different top ten. Herk listed weapons and tactics. Red gave me a lecture
on the history of pi. Toby was a freaking wellspring on every biological
advance from crop rotation to hookworm. That asshole knows how civilization
functions in ways I never even imagined. And every single person was absolutely
right in his or her field.”

“It’s an intractable
problem.”

“Exactly why we need
to decide ahead of time how we’re going to choose. A committee will never
agree, but a monarch will miss the diversity that Sensei took pains to recruit
from our world.”

Zeiss pondered this.
“So after we study the aborigines, each person gets to present one idea,
subject to some majority approval? I get a veto? That’s seventeen. How do we
decide the remaining ten?”

Lou leaned forward to
whisper in his ear. “Who knows? That’s the beauty of the committee: you don’t
have to know. Let them argue about this for the next year instead of how they
should be roasting your balls.”

“That’s
rather jaded,” Zeiss said.

“But
you like it,” Lou sang.

Red
came in with a set of glasses clinking. When she handed Lou his, he could feel
the ice rattling near the top and siphoned off the coldest liquid. “Careful,
Conrad,” she said. “It sounds like he has you down to your panties already.
He’s a slick talker.”

“Bless
you. There’s sugar in this. I never get any in the Hollow,” Lou said, changing
the subject.

“I
learned tea making from my Texan grandmother. It’s not tea without lethal
amounts of sugar. Are they rationing supplies already down there?” Red asked.

“No.
Yvette doesn’t want me to have any more sympathy weight-gain during the
pregnancy,” Lou admitted, patting his belly. “Speaking of which, could you
spare the medical personnel to save Mercy and the baby?”

Lou
felt shocking cold slither from his neck down his back. He had to untuck his
uniform shirt to let the ice cube escape. “Good one, Red. If I did that, it
would be considered sexual harassment.”

“I
did that to prevent myself from smacking you again,” she said. “Don’t ask him
to do an end run around my righteous indignation.”

Zeiss
said, “Let me talk to her for a while. I’ll see you after your shift.”

When Yuki rode up the
elevator to report for meteor monitoring duty that evening, Zeiss was sitting
at the patio table outside the saucer’s main entrance. He held a cup of tea and
a manifest. He appeared to be double-checking mesh bags of perishable food,
primarily fruit and melons. As she passed, he said, “Yuki, I owe you an
apology.”

The
scantily dressed technician stopped mid-stride, flabbergasted. “Sir?”

“All
my people must know how to fight because I can’t afford to lose any of you. You
are one of my people, and I’ve neglected you. What can you do in combat?”

“Um
. . . I prefer blade work, sir. I have a punching knife in my belt. I like
throwing blades, but the Magi confiscated our guns and every blade over ten
centimeters long.” After entering the vast ship, some items hadn’t reappeared
on the other end of decontamination, including some of Johnny’s kitchen
cutlery. “A punching knife is still good for holing suits, eyes, the jugular,
throat, kidneys, balls, lungs, and heart.”

“At
first, I pictured one of those pointy, metal key rings, but you make it sound
like a small ice pick. Show me,” Zeiss ordered. He slipped inside her guard and
grabbed her waistband, preventing the close-order knife from being drawn. When
she reached to twist his thumb off her waist, he blocked the attempt casually
with his left hand.

“I’d
be screwed, sir,” she replied. “I did my hand-to-hand test with small, paired
weapons. That’s out the window now.”

“Would
you consider sparring with me?” he asked. “I think we could both benefit. We
can work on my strength and your speed. We’ll try a police baton first, one
with the handle on the side so you can spin it for blocks or attacks. We’ll c
oncentrate
on low kicks, and I’ll have Red tutor you on fancy footwork to avoid grappling.
We need to rework your style. Heel sweeps and hip throws should be your first
line of defense. Instead of a follow-through with your opposite fist, we’ll
retrain you to use your feet.
”

She
knelt in front of him. He had once taught both Red and the great Kaguya Mori.
Rumor said he had killed one Override talent with a bamboo pole and faced
another unarmed for his team leadership badge. When Z tutored someone, they
were being groomed for leadership. Bowing fully, she said, “You honor me, sir.”

He shook his head. “This isn’t
about me. A black belt is just a white belt who didn’t give up.”

“When
and where?”

“I
prefer mornings. We’ll have to do it when Toby leaves the storage area—that’s
the best workout room. Someone off duty will need to referee.” He really meant
chaperone.

He
didn’t want to take advantage of her like every other man who tried to get her
alone. She didn’t know whether to be offended or flattered. Had Lou arranged this
for her as a payoff? “Why me?” she whispered.

The
commander shrugged. “We’re each weak in ways we’re afraid to expose to the
others. It’s a mutually beneficial association. I’m low on training hours
myself.” When she seemed unconvinced, he added, “You saved Mercy, which
would’ve earned anyone else a commendation, but you’ve turned the rest of the
crew against you with the water leak and the political fights over the
nanofabricator. I’m hoping that with a little seasoning you’ll make an officer
who solves more problems than she causes.”

Yuki
colored a little, something she hadn’t done since the age of ten. “We could
solve it all with another fabricator.”

He
snickered at the persistence of her request. Then again, his wife was the queen
of insistent. “I actually had Red brainstorm about that problem. Her idea was
to have the active fabricator print a fourth fabricator unit.”

Yuki
blinked. “That’s brilliant. We could print one for
Ascension
to carry to
the surface.”

“Whoa!
There are problems. It’s sort of like wishing for more wishes; it doesn’t work.
The nano units we have can only print spinnerets a micrometer across, no finer.
All the dimensions would be an order of magnitude larger than the original.”

Yuki
considered. “That’s okay. Over 90 percent of what we use the units for is
larger scale. Microweave fabric would be fine. In fact, five meters wide
instead of half a meter would work better for many of our applications.”

“You’re
serious? Even if we could build this behemoth, the rare metals have been hard
enough to find for your computer chips. The habitat recycles every trace metal
from the stubble and even our waste, using those beetles and the shrimp. The
ones with the shiniest shells carry the most metal. Nonetheless, we have to
collect hundreds of those bugs for enough exotic ingredients to print one of
your sensors. Every gram of mineral we bind up in solid form means less we can
use as fertilizer. Plus, where are we going to find more Gallium in this ship?
We’ve already scrapped everything we can, including some of our NASA locator
chips.”

Rising
to her feet, Yuki smiled. “What about the asteroids in this system? They have
most of what we need. Some of the other elements can be substituted.”

Zeiss
leaned back, folding his arms. “Sure, but that would mean months of planning
and require more fuel for the shuttle.”

“The
shuttle needs more fuel anyway to take off from B4.”

“We
planned to have the landing team distill the fuel from native resources on the
surface. I just spent time working the steps out with Risa.”

“Then
we use the same steps on an asteroid and show a net profit for the venture.
That way, we’ll have options and be able to leave the moon early if things get
too hot.”

“Maybe
we could find some ice, too,” he mused. “Then any water we happened to lose due
to an unexpected course change would vanish in the noise. Everyone would be too
focused on the side mission to care.”

“Sure,”
she agreed, uncertain why this was important.

“Would
Mercy complain about the extra risk?” he teased.

“No.
Since
Sanctuary
can match speeds with an asteroid so easily, we could
almost climb down to the asteroid surface on a tether—a glorified EVA. If we
can’t pull off a practice run to the corner store for chips and drinks, we’ll
never manage a landing and return from a higher g moon.”

Tilting
his head, Zeiss decided. “We could do this. Good work, specialist.” He casually
scribbled a few notes, as if he moved mountains every day. “If the others
agree, we can dedicate a fab to your arm as soon as we have the necessary minerals.”

Her
heart skipped a beat. In a matter of a few months, she could have an arm. He
was simply giving it to her, with no prerequisites or years of slavery. Yuki
stared at him, realizing for the first time how different a leader he was.
People solved problems with Zeiss not for him, and they did it because . . .
they were a family. Thanks to Lou and Mercy, she had family.

She
had been crying for several moments when she put her arm around the astonished
commander. “I won’t let you down,” she said, slobbering on his shoulder.

Embarrassed,
Zeiss tapped his badge. “Um . . . Red, could you come out here?”

****

Sojiro
hated bureaucracy, so he brought his sketch pad to the all-hands meeting. His
new, tilted musketeer hat hid his earbud from the others, and he listened to
Vivaldi. The heat in the barn meeting hall put everyone on edge. They bickered
about the stupidest things. After hours of arguing, the crew agreed to two test
runs. If they needed more raw materials, they could follow the same procedure
later in the Oblivion system. Planet Beta showed indications of rings that
could be mined.

The
first experiment would extract fuel components from the head of a large comet.
To accomplish this, they would strip
Ascension
from its eighteen-person
capacity down to a mere six. They could enlarge the fuel storage as well as
build an apparatus to siphon hydrocarbons from melted ice. As usual, the
command crew would need to ride in the cockpit: Zeiss, Lou, and Red. Everyone
was anxious to see if Lou’s new gravity sense would work on the comet. Lou
bragged that, once Mercy was thawed, he would be able find his way back to her
without instruments. They still had to choose three people in the cargo
section.

The
most experienced space hand and former miner, Oleander, was disqualified from
this impromptu journey due to pellagra—a vitamin B3 imbalance caused by too
much corn and not enough beans. She was pale, tired, and the sun gave her a
butterfly-shaped rash. No one had noticed until the planning meeting because
she always worked night shifts. Oleander explained, “Mercy hasn’t been around
to nag me into eating right.”

Toby
said, “This disorder may have been the source of some vampire legends.”

Sojiro
was already busy sketching her in a variety of Vampirella costumes.

“This
is a simple extraction, though,” Oleander advised. “Outside the shuttle, we
just need someone to chop the comet ice into manageable chunks and suck them up
through the vacuum hose. Herk can work the drill in his heavy space armor. The
other two people can run the distillery inside the craft to separate the pure
water from the shuttle fuel components.”

The
identities of the two crewmen took the most debate.

Mercy
knew the most about the ship’s specifications, as she’d built it. However, she
wouldn’t be fit for the journey due to the heavy medications and high-risk
pregnancy. Nadia, the energy expert, was a distant third choice to monitor the
fuel conversion, which left one more person for the cargo hold.

As
a propulsion designer and Nadia’s lover, Park lobbied to accompany her. Zeiss
was reluctant to agree because the task would require constant talking and
adjusting of dials based on gut feelings—neither of which fit the Korean’s
profile. Furthermore, someone had to pilot
Sanctuary
.

Toby,
as a nano expert, and Sonrisa, as a metalworker, would be constructing the
chemical distillery. Both wanted to be there for the field trial; however, no
one trusted Toby to be alone with any of the women. In the end, Sonrisa won out
for the mission.

The
second mission, at the other extreme, would pull a handful of small, metal-rich
meteors into the landing bay with glorified lassos or nets. They discussed
spear guns, but a failure could knock the chunk of rock further away. The
targets clustered in a cloud of debris along their existing path to intersect
the subspace nexus point. Yuki answered questions about where the most
sought-after minerals could be found in the greatest concentrations so that
with one stop, the team could collect the best haul.

During
this discussion, Sojiro sketched a wooden arm positioned in a martial arts
block. During a pivotal part of the debate, Yuki was staring at his paper
instead of paying attention. Pratibha had to ask her twice for details about
Yttrium and tradeoffs for other types of lasers. When the meeting slowed to a
close like the viewing at a funeral, Yuki leaned over to her new roommate and
whispered, “Am I Pinocchio now?”

“We
can save two weeks of fabrication if we carve the elbow section out of wood.
Later,” the artist promised.

Watching
the details of her new hand unfold, she noted that the palm held the battery
unit, making power connections closer to the servo motors and preventing a
repeat of her earlier disaster if the battery ever exploded. Hypnotized by
possibility, she barely paid attention to the rest of the crew as they
adjourned for cookies and coffee. Then she watched him as he worked from
memory. “Damn, I wish you were straight,” she told him when the light started
to fade.

Sojiro
smiled wanly. “Let’s concentrate on something we can change, shall we?” He
flipped back to the first sketch. “As replacements go, legs are far easier. The
blades don’t even have to look like the originals to function well.
Transhumeral
prosthetics are hard, all custom. Your first replacement has twenty-six joints,
eighteen motors, and 100 sensors.”

“How do you know what it’s going to
look like? I haven’t even been in to the doctor’s office for measurements.”

“Toby scanned your old arm
thoroughly when you were in stasis. I’ve also seen your clothing closet . . .
or floor as the case may be, so I know roughly how much bicep you have left by
where you placed the pins in each sleeve. We’ll do the fine work just before
final assembly. All I’ve built so far is a harness that goes across your chest
and over the shoulder. An artificial arm is full of design tradeoffs. Knowing
you, I’ve favored durability over lightness, usability more than looks, and
immediate gratification over permanence. I’ve also made the components easily
accessible so you can repair them one-handed or tinker with improvements.”

She grinned at the personality
analysis built into the arm. “Could I lift heavy loads like that cyborg on TV?”

The artist shook his head. “Your spinal
column would collapse. That’s why Herk uses space armor with an exoskeleton to
do his superhero impressions.”

“Could I put a soldering iron in
the finger? That would be handy.”

“Maybe. Come to the computer lab
with me; otherwise, you’re not going to let me get any sleep tonight.” He led
her to his workroom in a cool cave in the Hollow. “How are the experiments going
for eavesdropping on the Oblivion natives?” Sojiro asked idly.