Starborn and Godsons Read online

  “And if they can’t land?” Cadzie asked.

  “They’ll still be able to take care of Stolzi.”

  “And if there aren’t any?”

  “Oh, come on, Cadzie. There’s a ship out there, it’s slowing down! If there’s really no one we’ll have a crash program to fit that Minerva for one last flight. You know that.”

  “Carlos—”

  “How many do we have to risk? Someone has to stay there—”

  “We’ll all stay.”

  “No. You won’t. Someone needs to bring Cassandra down, and you’ll both be needed to fix her. We’ve been through all this a dozen times, and maybe I’m getting weary of it.”

  “And I’m not going without Cadzie,” Joan said quietly. “Toad says it’s his job, and he’s mission commander, and that’s the way it is. Goodbye, Carlos.” She reached out to the switch on the console and without hesitation cut the feed.

  “Well . . that’s ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.”

  Joanie sighed, and stood, bracing her arms on balled fists on the table top. “Patch me through to Surf’s Up,” she said.

  Cassandra responded sluggishly. But in a few moments there appeared a hunky guy, Nordic but tanned enough to be a Samoan Triplet. His shoulder-length sunbleached hair distinguished him instantly as a member of their coastal community.

  “Thor,” she sighed.

  “Hey, Joanie!”

  “Thor,” she repeated, even less enthusiastically this time. What was that shadow behind him?

  “How are things up there?”

  “I have a problem,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m stuck up here for two weeks with Weyland-Sikes.”

  Thor laughed. “The boy scout? I figure you’ll survive.”

  “I just wanted . . .” She felt herself fighting for words.

  “You’re all right?” Thor asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, man. Well, that’s the most important thing. Listen,” he said, already sounding bored. “Keep me posted.” Behind Thor was a clingy looking sun-bronzed Asian girl. Mei Ling, that was her name, wasn’t it? Geologist?

  Bitch.

  The image faded.

  Joanie sat back, an irritated whistle escaping pursed lips. “Well, that’s just fine.”

  “What?” Cadzie asked.

  “Didn’t you see Mei Ling? I’ve only been gone for six hours and she’s already on him like paint. In two weeks she’ll have moved in.”

  “I think we have bigger problems.”

  She sagged in defeat. “So . . what if they’re right. What do we do?”

  Cadzie scanned the room. “Well, we have plenty of work to do. I suppose we can tolerate close quarters for fourteen days.”

  “Unless we die of boredom.”

  Cadzie’s answering smile was downright evil. God, she hated him sometimes. “You can try cold sleep.”

  For an instant she considered that, and then realized the very nasty joke he was making at her expense. “We can’t do that.”

  “No, we can’t,” he agreed. “Glad we’ve got that out of the way.”

  “Two weeks. Not so bad.”

  “Please don’t think I’m delighted with it.”

  “Then we’ll have to take a chance on an autopilot assist of the Minerva. Or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Adam and Eve in space,” Cadzie said. That old evil smile flickered again. He really was a bastard, wasn’t he?

  “Oh, grendel piss on that.”

  “Well, then, we’d better see how we’ll set up housekeeping, and get about it.”

  “Remember,” Joan said. “You take your side, I’ll take mine.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 10 ♦

  enemies with benefits

  Ten days later . . .

  The eternal background hum of the machines had become almost unnoticeable to Joanie. The days had taken on a routine, as days tended to do for people with organized minds. From morning to night, she arose, exercised, ate, worked, exercised, and slept, interacting with Cadmann Sikes as little as possible.

  She was leaving the communications center to stretch her legs when Cadzie came jogging along the central corridor, bare-chested and gleaming, a runner’s legs beneath a rock-climber’s torso.

  She frowned, and without a word disappeared back into the center. Their living situation was increasingly uncomfortable, more every day, like an insect buzzing in her ear. Irritating. Distracting.

  Arrgh.

  It was that pesky Adam and Eve thing, almost as if she had ancient wiring that refused to shut off. Being stuck on Geographic with someone she . . loathed? Did she hate him? Once upon a time she had followed him around Cadmann’s Bluff like a puppy, trying desperately to get his attention, losing hope and then hoping again when her body developed and she felt some deep ache that balanced with the anger and resentment. Everything twisted and knotted together into a ball she knew she’d never untangle.

  They could talk about it, or ignore it. Ignoring it had been the tactic until now, but talking seemed more attractive all the time.

  She brooded much of the rest of the day, then looked up his location finder, and saw that he was busy in the tool shop.

  Too busy over the next hour to brood, but just before ten o’clock in the evening, Camelot time, Joanie made a decision.

  Unka Carlos had once told Cadzie that you know when you are doing something you love, because when engaged in such things you lose track of the time. In that case, he was totally in love with his work in the machine shop.

  That was certainly true of Marvin Stolzi, who had disappeared into the engine room, where a lifetime of study and tinkering awaited him, toys that might keep him busy for a dozen lifetimes. He was sleeping and eating in there as well, and they barely saw him at all.

  And that time-dissolving thing was true for Cadzie when he was playing with the culinary fabricator. It manipulated proteins to create food. Was there any way to use it to manipulate polycarbon paste to produce parts for the time-worn Minerva? Cassandra said it wasn’t likely, but what the heck, trial and error had accomplished miracles more than once . . .

  Joanie entered the machine shop wearing a workout suit. Carrying a meal from their fabricator, and a bottle from their well-stocked cellar.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “You’ve not taken a break in twenty hours.”

  He smelled the food, and heard his stomach growl. “I didn’t know you cared enough to keep track.”

  “I brought you a snack,” she said.

  Cadzie sniffed. It did smell delicious. “Okay . . right. You take a bite first.”

  She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Oh, come on.”

  He plucked a meatball from atop a tangled mass of spaghetti. Delicious. The protein paste reservoirs had been replenished only a couple of years back, and the new spices, some derived from native Avalonian sources, still had plenty of oomph. “I was kidding. Maybe.”

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “You go first?” he was talking with his mouth full.

  She sighed. “I was thinking that . . maybe we could do each other some good.”

  “Oh? In what way?”

  “I’m . . .” she seemed to be having a hard time fitting her mouth around her thoughts. “Kind of used to certain things. And we’ve been up here ten days . . hoping that we might wrap things up ahead of time, but I doubt it.”

  That concern was his as well. As well as his exertions with the fabricators, Cadzie had been working on a chip taken from the regulators on the sleep pods. No one was using the pods, or was likely to, ever again. If he could reprogram the chips, it was possible . . .

  He remembered that he’d been asked a question. Or that a question had been implied. The wine was doing its work. Joanie seemed to know what she was about, even if he didn’t. “Well, we’d better be. The only other option has a sixty percent risk of burning up on re-entry, or crashing. I don’t much like
those odds.”

  “I’m no happier about them,” Joan said. “I assume we’re getting back to work in a few hours?”

  “Cutting those couplings is harder than I thought. We have to do it without undue vibration or raising the temperature too much, and that limits options. We don’t want to fry her brain.”

  “That’s a happy thought.”

  “Hey,” Cadzie said. “You think I like it?”

  She took a deep breath. So deep that Cadzie began to grow impatient. “So . . what is this about?”

  “This,” she said, and placing a hand on either side of his face, drew him closer and kissed him.

  Startled, he pulled back. “Whoa. Whoa. What is this?”

  “It isn’t true love,” she whispered, her lips still brushing his.

  “That would have been my bet.” He said it, but he felt a small fire ignite down south of his guts. He had very carefully buried those thoughts, and here she’d woken them right up. Be careful what you ask for, lady . . .

  “Look, take it as lightly as you want. Or just as a physical release. Or emotional comfort. I’m not exactly hideous?” She paused, as if realizing she’d tagged an inadvertent question mark to the end of that sentence.

  So . . a touch of insecurity? Strange that that made her more attractive. “No . . but let’s just say this is enough of a surprise that I have to shift gears just to think about it.”

  She pulled back, suddenly comprehending. “Oh my God. You’re a romantic, aren’t you?”

  “I guess. Two moms.”

  She frowned, and then grinned. “Then why don’t you invite me to dinner?”

  “Pushy little thing,” he laughed. “I’ve spent the last week disassembling a machine designed to remain stable for over a century. I think we have at least six days left.”

  “Maybe it’s time to stop working so hard?” the question again. “All work and no play . . I’ll bring the wine,” she said.

  “You already did.” They both grinned, and there was something urchin and mischievous in hers that finally melted the ice. Oh, what the hell . . . he thought.

  And rolled her into his arms. “We can eat later.”

  An hour later he said, “Enemies. With benefits.”

  ♦ ChaptEr 11 ♦

  messenger

  Messenger’s deceleration was less severe now, and everyone felt that, but it meant more work in the gleaming row of exercise machines. Resistance servos built into their clothing provided constant stress on muscles and joints, imitating gravity. There were even suggestions that planning sessions ought to be held during exercises, but Speaker Augustus hadn’t taken that seriously. He left details to his chiefs. They had grown up in gravity, and it was recent to them. He’d been in low gravity for most of his life now, supported more by drugs than exercise, and even the partial gravity of deceleration towards rendezvous with Tau Ceti IV felt strange and uncomfortable. He wondered if he could ever live on a planet again.

  The warriors awakening now would remember spending very little time in space and low gravity. They’d been about twenty years old when they went to sleep. Experience watching others awaken told Augustus that it would take about a week for the physiological effects of cold sleep to wear off. During that time they could in theory be learning, but they probably wouldn’t be. Everything would be strange to them.

  “And what should they be learning, Captain Meadows?” Augustus asked. “What must we all know?”

  Meadows was the tallest man in the room, a serious young man, a gold-bearded Viking thirty-two Earth years old when he went under. He had some command experience guarding mercy missions and putting down civil disorders before he went to sleep. “What have you learned, Captain?”

  “Sir. We detect some signals between the orbiting ship—it’s definitely the starship Geographic—and the world below it. They aren’t strong enough to let us hear clearly, but the snatches we get are likely to be standard encryption in use in the Earth system when Geographic was built. If that’s the case we’ll probably never be able to listen in. They were pretty paranoid about hacking in those days.” Gertrude giggled.

  Captain Meadows looked at her sternly. “Miss Hendricksen, do you have a question?”

  “No, Captain. And do call me Trudy. I was amused because I understand that one of the reasons the Geographic builders gave for their paranoia was that the Godsons kept hacking their equipment. Another indication of karma in this universe.”

  Major Gloria Stype drew a breath, loudly, as if shocked, but she didn’t say anything. Trudy bowed her head slightly toward the officer. “Sorry, Major, but it was probably true that we really had done that, at least that’s what I learned at the Academy. Didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t learn to talk about it,” Stype said coldly.

  Trudy smiled. “Yes. Ma’am. Apologies for interrupting, Your Grace.”

  “Yes. We have time to talk.” The Speaker grinned mirthlessly as he shook his head. “Lots of time. The purpose of these sessions is to decide how we will interact with the colonists already at Tau Ceti IV. Of course, they own that planet under international law, but as Trudy and Captain Meadows keep telling me, there are no means of enforcing that.”

  Everyone nodded. If anyone said anything it was not heard above the constant dull vibration of Messenger’s engines as they decelerated toward the planet. “And we know very little about them, but we’re getting close enough to make some observations.” He turned to Meadows. “Captain, as we approach Geographic we’ll need to know everything we can about it. That may come to nothing. We might be invited aboard. If we are, you will go first. The goal is to make friends. Your mission is to assess the possibilities. After you will come Gertrude. If she finds that all is well, a landing party, including me, will follow.”

  “You, Your Grace?”

  “Of course. We should be very careful not to insult our hosts.”

  “I have not assessed your competence in free space,”

  Major Stype said. “Your Grace.”

  “I learned long ago, and recently had refreshment from Trudy. She has pressure suit training.”

  “Decades ago,” Stype said.

  The Speaker chuckled. “Last month to her,” he said.

  “And the equipment is hardly likely to have changed.”

  Gertrude nodded, and said, “Precisely. But I did not have much training, Your Grace.”

  “But enough to keep me safe, given that I had the same training, but long ago, not recently, like you,” Augustus said. “If you did not feel competent you would have told me so.” His tone left no place for argument, and there was none. “Captain, we need to know how many warriors you’ll need to board that ship if no one invites us aboard. I know you military people argue that more is better because overwhelming force saves having to fight, but we don’t want to wake up more people than we have to. Not until we know they’re needed.”

  “So that’s the real mission, Your Grace? To take control of Geographic?”

  “To a first approximation, Captain. We need to be sure that Geographic will not be used to damage Messenger. That’s the first and simplest mission, Captain. We do not require control in the sense of command, merely to be certain that there is no threat to our primary mission. We then have to decide what we do next. Our mission—this ship’s mission—is to establish a colony and set it on a course of industrialization, capable of building an endless stream of colony ships and sending them on their way. To build the Capital Planet of Human Civilization in this Galaxy, to put it as dramatically as I can. That was the plan, but hibernation instability and our course change may have altered that.”

  “You mean that the Geographic colonists undoubtedly have other plans,” Trudy said quietly.

  “As they must. I am astonished to find Geographic still in orbit,” the Speaker said. “To the best approximation we have discovered, one of their goals was to establish a viable colony, duplicate everything aboard the ship that they might need for that colony, perhaps
restock some of the genetic materials and human embryos employed in colonizing, and send Geographic on to another planet. They obviously have not done this. We do not know why.”

  “They have a colony on the island, and outlying works on the mainland,” Captain Meadows said. “But they have obviously encountered difficulties. I say this because their colony is small. Few roads. No obvious harbors. They have not expanded much. We do not know if this is due to technical difficulties, opposition on the planet, or . . .”

  “Or simple lack of motivation. They may even have gone primitive, reverted to uncivilized life,” the Speaker said sadly. “We can hope not, but we cannot be certain. We must be prepared for any eventuality. We are the only expedition known to have the mission of galactic exploration. It is well to remind ourselves of our mission,” the Speaker said. “We can let nothing compromise it.” He stood. “We did not light the torch.”

  The others stood. Their voices were passionate. “And we will not see the bonfire.”

  “To Man’s destiny.”

  Speaker Augustus sat carefully. “The Prophet always told me that it is well to remind ourselves of our mission. Frequently. It helps keep our thoughts in focus. Major, you have something to say.”

  “I do. The Geographic settlers will not care for us,” Major Stype said. “They explicitly forbade any Godsons or former Godsons to go on this expedition. We have records of the discussions. They were not even polite.”

  There were subtle rustlings, sounds of impatience. “Yes, I know we are telling many of you things you already know,” the Speaker said quietly, “but it needs saying. We did not come on a mission of conquest. This wasn’t the chosen destination of this ship.”

  The Speaker turned to the tall, silent man who sat beside him. “Captain Richards, let’s review our options. I see only two. We either stop here and unload a small group to encourage and assist these people as we go elsewhere, in which case we don’t want to awaken anyone we don’t have to; or we stop here, wake a lot of people up, and turn this planet into the Galactic Capital. Can we all agree on that?”

  His tone indicated that he didn’t expect anyone to disagree. When everyone had nodded, he continued. “Either way is easier if the colonists down there cooperate. We don’t know what’s down there. It can’t be all that much, but they have had generations and they brought a lot of embryos. They should have made fair progress toward developing an industrial spacefaring civilization.”