Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (13 page)

The missiles only chased
Sanctuary
for an hour before
dark-side debris collisions ended them all. After a brief celebration, the
planners paired off into bedrooms. Auckland bunked with Sojiro, and Mercy hung
on the wall alone, convinced that Yuki would be back to the girls’ dorm eventually.

Mercy wondered if there would be
any electric lights or glow panels overhead when they didn’t have sunlight
streaming in through the windows this coming winter. With no one to talk to,
she pondered configurations for the engines that would maintain a safe gravity
around the mountain but weightlessness in Olympus. She wore her faceplate for
the screen and took notes with her air keyboard for an hour. When she finally
slipped into unconsciousness, odd finger twitches were recorded as garbled
noise.

Eight hours later, Sojiro knocked
on her faceplate, and she awoke with a start. “Huh?”

“You always sleep in a helmet?” the
Japanese artist asked.

“No,” Mercy moaned. “Only when I
want my neck to hurt. Oh.”

“Yvette said you’re prone to muscle
cramps. I’m a masseur,” Sojiro said. “Take that off and bend over.”

In the door to the room, Yuki joked,
“If I had a dollar for every time a guy said that . . . today.”

Mercy colored a little as her
roommate rummaged through a bag for a nutrient tube. “You’re looking very
clean.”

Yuki chuckled. “Funny. I feel the
opposite.”

“I know you didn’t get a chance to
pack extra clothes before we left Earth,” Mercy said. “You can borrow some of
mine if you want.”

“Thanks!” Yuki rummaged through her
roommate’s well-organized kit hanging from the wall and unrolled a pair of silk
pants with a drawstring. She held the food tube in her teeth while she wiggled
into the new, more comfortable clothing. “Your tops would be too roomy for me,
but these are perfect.”

“Don’t spoil your breakfast,” Sojiro
warned. “We’re having a big family meal in the dining room in ten minutes.”

“Family meal?” asked Yuki, dubious.

“Yeah. Our team celebrates every
Sunday dinner and holiday together, ever since Red arrived at the Academy.”
Gesturing to the two women, he said, “You’re part of the team now.”

Yuki put the meal tube back, seal
unbroken, and left for the room where the cooking supplies were stored.

Sojiro repeated, “Unstrap and on
your belly.”

As he worked her over, Mercy asked
about his comic strip and sky cities. She snuck in the important question. “Who’s
my character?”

“Do you remember the daughters of
the wind in the Odyssey? You’re one of those, and you help the travelers on
their journey.”

“Sort of honoring my father and
sisters. I suppose he could be considered a Lord of the Aerospace.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I picked the
north wind because of the whole snowflake theme.”

“What’s my character’s motivation?”

“Oh. Your father forced you to
become a nun to protect you, and you want to escape to have an adventure. You’ll
still wear the habit for the first few episodes.”

“What?”

“It’s a joke. In your Catholic
school yearbook, you were voted most likely to become a nun. I think your
sister Mary was the one who nominated you.”

Mercy couldn’t respond. She hadn’t
even read her yearbook.

Sojiro continued. “I meant it as a
compliment. You take care of everyone, and you’re very . . . spiritual.”

She felt better after the massage,
but the nun comment still rankled. Was that her fate?

When they entered the dining hall,
breakfast was in full swing—omelets, toast with squeeze jam, and native
oranges. Lou proclaimed the punch line to an off-color joke, “You want beef
with broccoli?” and everyone laughed but Mercy.

Red told the newcomers, “I’m
abstaining from the local food because I tend to react to substances the worst,
but the other team says the fruit is safe. Half of us are trying the oranges to
build up the intestinal flora, as Toby puts it.”

Sojiro grabbed one. “It can’t be
worse for me than raw fish, or as bad as Mercy falling asleep in her suit.”

“Helmet hair!” Red joked.

Mercy growled. “I’ve been trying to
solve
your
problem—how to get to relativistic velocities without
pancaking the crew or the ecosystem.”

“How did you do?”

“Not so well. I can keep the
interior gravity all around the sphere bearable, but with all the constraints,
I can’t find a way to accelerate faster than one g.”

Positioned so he could see the lens
view from his seat, Zeiss blotted his mouth with a napkin and launched past
Mercy into the control center for a better look. “Trouble,” he announced. “One
of the shuttles is following us.”

“
Cherub
,” said Mercy,
recognizing subtle differences in the design instantly. “They’re stripped down
to just the cockpit and an oversized water tank.”

“Could someone have modified a
captured shuttle to become a weapon?”

“Or message torpedo,” she
suggested.

“As long as we can see them, they
can theoretically hurt us,” Zeiss stated. “We need to find out who they are and
why they’re after us.”

“Ever use TiVo?” asked Sojiro,
sliding into the snowflake in his customary slot. He snapped his prosthetic fingers
with a regular beat. “Snowflake, measure the time between these pulses. Until
further calibrated, we’ll call their average duration one second. We will call
sixty seconds a minute and sixty minutes an hour. Confirm.” A chime sounded.
“Show me the lens view eight hours ago.”

The view of the moon during the
last assault appeared. “Forward to a view one minute later.” The picture
changed. “Continue to do so, holding each image for one second before
advancing.”

After a minute, Zeiss said, “The
attack is over by this timestamp. This shows the shuttle leaving lunar orbit.”

“Snowflake, stop,” Mercy commanded,
and the error chime sounded.

“Override permission granted for
Mercy for all operations,” Sojiro said.

“Go back five minutes and advance
in real time.” When the drive flare of the shuttle appeared, everyone recognized
it. She pointed with her nanochipped finger. “Halt. Center on the energy
signature of that drive unit, add green coloring for contrast, usual hue.
Continue to advance as Sojiro requested, with this center point and coloring.”

They watched the fast-forward movie
of the shuttle as it flew to L1, rescued more marooned astronauts, and ferried
them to a space station. “Freeze. Zoom by factor of ten.”

“They took the survivors to the
Chinese space station, probably so
Cherub
could go back for more
survivors sooner,” Zeiss guessed.

“Advance in real time,” Sojiro
requested. They all watched as astronauts in strange suits swapped the cargo
section for fuel pods, and the shuttle accelerated directly toward the lens. Recently,
the shuttle passed the midpoint of its voyage and began braking.

“The bloody Chinese have captured
the shuttle,” Lou deduced. “Killing our friends and family isn’t enough for
them. The nuke-happy bastards want us, too.”

“We can’t be certain it’s an
invasion force or a bomb. Estimated minutes till intersection?” asked Zeiss.
The number seventy-eight appeared on the bubble.

“We can’t let them land in our
dock. Even if that’s not an invasion force, Sensei could end our test if they
break the charter. Let me arm
Ascension’s
COIL gun; I can blow them out
of the sky.”

“No unnecessary deaths.” Over the
radio, Zeiss warned Herk, “Prepare for evasive maneuvers.”

Frustrated, Lou raised his voice to
the commander. “To spur this horse to a gallop, we need a
direction
, Z.
Where’s the weak point, the nexus? Unless you find that, we have no choice but
to shoot that shuttle down.”

Yuki wrinkled her forehead. “What’s
the big deal? Ask Snowflake.”

“I tried,” Sojiro replied.

“Did he say he already taught you
with the pages?”

“No, just that it was our test.”

“But you can access any image the
lens has captured in our system?”

“Yes.”

“How about the
first
picture?
You can use the star pattern and date to tell you where
Sanctuary
came
in. We should be able go out the same way.”

The room went silent. Auckland was the first to thaw. “She shoots; she scores!”

Zeiss nodded. “Way to pull it out
in the clinch.”

“Valued team member,” Mercy said,
hugging her new friend.

Sojiro didn’t congratulate her
because he was too busy tracking the hole, and overlaying the solar system from
that time. The hole on the screen hovered directly over Saturn. “I guess that
explains the hexagon pattern at the planet’s north pole.”

“I’ll find us the best way there,”
Zeiss said, sliding under the control dome. “Red, you stall.”

The couple was so in-tune that she
didn’t acknowledge the order. Red crawled into the command cradle as her
husband asked, “At our maximum safe thrust, keeping ahead of this shuttle, how
long will our trip take?”

“If we didn’t have to worry about
braking, we could get there in 156 hours.”

Zeiss shook his head. “We can’t
decelerate because both vehicles will be traveling about the same rate by then.
Mercy modeled the acceleration curves for
Sanctuary
on our shuttle
fleet. If we brake, they’ll catch us.”

“Could we make the jump to subspace
while moving 2 percent the speed of light?” Red asked.

“No reason not to, as long as we
stop accelerating for the jump,” the mission commander replied. “Aim for this
intercept point.”

“6.5 days till winter,” Mercy
whispered. “I suppose if God could create the whole world in that amount of
time, we can cobble together a base camp.”

The ship started moving almost
immediately.

The manga artist floated out of the
harness soon after, massaging his temples and complaining, “I can’t watch this,
or I won’t be able to eat breakfast.”

“That was fast,” said Yuki.

“It’s just a first-order
approximation of our path,” Sojiro explained. “Mainly, she wanted to tack at a
ninety-degree angle from the pursuer, forcing them to waste fuel decelerating
while we build up velocity.”

Yuki asked, “So how far away is
Saturn?”

“About 1.4 billion kilometers from
here,” Mercy replied.

“How do you remember this junk?”

“I memorized the distance in AUs
and convert to all the other units—90 light minutes.”

Zeiss laid out a more exact path on
the screen and then ordered, “Mercy, punch in the gravity compensation model
you worked up last night, and help me to make the adjustments. Lou, warn the
campers in the hollow to gather all the food they can and put it into storage
this week.”

“This could be bumpy,” warned
Mercy.

“Just keep the water in the
riverbed, not the Hollow,” Zeiss requested. “The minute you finish, the rest of
us need as much time as possible to plan the first leg through subspace.”

“As if I didn’t have enough
pressure,” Mercy moaned. “I don’t like life-or-death experiments. Didn’t I quit
that job?”

Yuki asked, “What would your father
tell you, Mercy?”

She held her Susan B coin and said,
“Astronauts don’t whine.”

Yuki felt like an eighth wheel when Zeiss slipped into quantum-computing
mode, firing a stream of questions at every other planning team member. Auckland monitored their vitals constantly. After a morning of brute-force calculation, Zeiss
decided that mapping the entire subspace route at once was beyond them. Both he
and his wife were exhausted from using their talents. Sojiro was tired from operating
the maps.

Lou couldn’t spend any quality time
with Yuki because he lost most of the afternoon playing stand-in commander and talking
to the campers. She couldn’t care less about insects from the swamp having
bright shells indicative of specific metal and minerals extracted from the silt
of the creek. Of slightly more interest, the searchers found caves that seemed custom-made
for food storage. With the perfect storehouses, Herkemer’s team gathered fruit
and nuts from the lensward orchards while Pratibha planned colony-building strategy
with Lou.

The second day, Red isolated a
stable point on their journey where they could rest in safety while they
computed the next leg. Zeiss threw himself at the reduced problem, frustrated
at how fluid the paths were. “Without a Probability Mechanics expert, we’re
trying to sculpt a Jell-O swan with a hammer.”

Pushing the limits of his medically
allowed time, Zeiss said, “I think I see a pattern. If I can have a few more
minutes—”

Mercy laid a hand on his shoulder
and said softly, “Z, it looks familiar because this is
today’s
data. You
need what subspace is going to look like 120 hours from now.”

Head aching, their commander
grumbled something in German and quit.

Red hugged him when he sat up. “You’ll
beat it tomorrow, babe,” she encouraged.

Yuki said, “In college I remember
mapping the best way through traffic lights. We made one axis time and the
other distance along the street. A green light appears as a window of time on
the graph time. To compute the ideal speed, we found the straight line that
would pass through the most open windows.”

That evening, Sojiro changed the
map, showing eighteen years’ worth of data in the same 3-D display, circling
the beginning and end points in white. Starting at the edges of the map, he pruned
all paths that didn’t lead where they wanted.

“Why eighteen years?” asked Mercy.

“We’re not sure how fast we’ll
travel under the sheet. Just because you have a light-powered sail doesn’t mean
you go the speed of light.”

Mercy shook her head when she examined
his progress. “You can’t cut those threads as dead ends. We could exit a nexus
and come back in through normal space at roughly the same spot minutes or days
later. The nexus looks like a piece of spaghetti wandering through time and
space—like the way Vonnegut’s aliens saw stars.”

Going back to the original plot,
Mercy spent the next shift connecting nexus locations in space with green time
lines. Auckland wanted her to stop when her time slot was over, but she
replied, “This operation is as detail-oriented as microsurgery to attach a
limb. If I stop, someone else will have to start from scratch.”

The doctor let her continue until she
slid out from under the snowflake helmet. “Thanks, Doc. Do you have anything to
stop my ears from ringing?”

Lou climbed in for his session
while the other two chatted. They were all trying their hardest to make some
progress by Zeiss’ time slot the next morning.

“How long have your ears been
bothering you?” Auckland asked.

Mercy shrugged. “Maybe fifteen
minutes or so.”

“You’re banned from interface duty
for the next twenty-four hours,” Auckland said, with no trace of humor.

“You can’t do that. You let me go
over, and my contract doesn’t say anything about—”

“I can and will. Argue, and I’ll
make it two. Tell her, Lou.”

When Mercy turned to look at the
control bubble to see if it was safe to interrupt Lou, she saw him
systematically erasing or redrawing every one of her connections. “What are you
doing?” she bellowed. When Lou didn’t answer, she started to shake, which worried
the doctor a bit. Rather than shout louder like Red might, Mercy effectively
pulled the power cord. “Snowflake, disregard Lou’s input.”

That grabbed his attention. The
pilot shot out from under the helmet so fast that Yuki had to catch him on the
way by to avoid a fist fight. “Who the hell do you think you are, you crazy b—”

Yuki put a hand over his mouth,
making him even angrier. He removed the hand and tried to flip her. However,
she was anchored with straps, and he wasn’t. She pinned him soon after and
whispered, “Calm down. Mercy’s caution has saved my life repeatedly. Listen to her
before you take her head off.”

Everyone except Zeiss was peeking
out their doors at the confrontation.

Lou looked at the Asian woman
pressed against him and tried unsuccessfully to stay mad. “My bad. Okay, crazy
lady, why did you scrub my mission?”

“Did you save my progress?” Mercy
asked.

“No. It wasn’t
progress
; it was
all wrong,” Lou said matter-of-factly.

Sojiro winced. “Dude, some words
should be avoided around women. Would you have saved Z’s work?”

“Of course.”

Mercy crossed her arms and
glowered, waiting for the man to dig himself deeper.

Lou said, “Because he knows how to
navigate. Miss Magic Fingers doesn’t.”

Mercy raised a finger and sucked in
a mighty breath to blast him with both barrels; however, Auckland intervened.
“Easy, girl. We all know you constructed the fastest ship in the solar system.
Lou, why don’t you explain the problem in a way
I
could understand?”

The pilot pointed to a straight,
green line on the bubble overhead. “When we pop out of subspace, we keep the
same velocity and bearing exiting as when we went in. To reenter, we need to
loop around and approach from the proper angle. It took us six days to build up
this much juice. We can’t turn on a dime to change tracks. I’m adjusting each
approach vector and chopping the windows we can’t meet.”

“For the first hop only?” Red asked
softly, stepping into the zero-g room and closing the bedroom door behind her.

“Why only the first one?” asked
Lou, suddenly wary.

Red whispered, “Because depending
on the course you choose for reentry, we’ll have a whole different set of
criteria for the next exit. The same three points could work differently
depending on order.”

“Crap,” Lou said, feeling like a
heel. “This problem is impossible.”

Vindicated, Mercy said, “Snowflake,
can you undo the last couple minutes of Lou’s changes to the green lines?”
Fainter green lines appeared where changes had been made. “Excellent. Save this
image as Mercy 3.”

“Let’s get Mercy to bed,” Auckland insisted. To Yuki, he said, “Keep her there for at least eight hours, and no
space-helmet screen time.”

“You’re not my dad,” Mercy said,
slurring her words a little.

“Two days,” Auckland said.

Yuki steered her friend toward
their room. After Mercy was strapped in, Lou tapped on the door. Yuki turned to
her recent boyfriend and asked, “Come to apologize?”

“Um . . . I came to ask for my
command-chair privileges back. She locked me out.”

Holding back a smile, Yuki said,
“So you came to apologize before asking a favor?”

Red snickered from the other room.
Lou wasn’t accustomed to dealing with women outside the bedroom. Like a four
year old, Lou rolled his eyes and mumbled, “Sorry for the b-word.”

“And?” Yuki pressed.

“I will endeavor to show you the
same respect I show to any man on the team.”

Mercy didn’t have to say a word;
she wiggled her fingers like a TV witch, hitting the invisible return key with
a flourish. “Apology accepted. Next time you use that word against me or any of
my friends, I’ll switch your interface so you have to say something
embarrassing before every command.”

Lou opened his mouth to argue, but
Yuki ushered him out before he could incur the wrath of the geek goddess. When
her roommate came back in, Mercy admitted, “Okay, he’s not as bad at math as I
thought.”

Yuki shrugged. “I’m not dating him
for his mind, or his singing talent. But the fact that he’s trainable is a
plus.”

“Singing?”

“He’s an encyclopedia of drinking
songs and dirty limericks. The funniest song today was one called ‘the King of
the Cannibal Islands.’”

“I can’t believe he’s cheating on
his fiancée so soon.”

Yuki leaned beside Mercy and
whispered, “Lou feels terrible about her death, but he’d already broken off the
relationship. He knew we wouldn’t be back for years and set her free.”

“Then why was she at Alcantara?”

“So people wouldn’t get suspicious.
I told you; Lou
needs
people, and he’s very loyal. When his old crew
washed out at Sirius Academy, do you know why he joined Red’s team?”

“No.”

“Because when Sojiro was beaten in
some kind of hate crime, her whole team rushed to his side.”

“So
Llewellyn
is needy. Why should I cut the jerk any slack?”

“He doesn’t have a lot of good
models for social interaction. His mom died when he was young. His father
pushed him and his brothers so hard to achieve that his oldest brother killed
himself at boarding school. When Lou made pilot on this mission, do you know
what his dad said? ‘Why didn’t you make commander?’”

Mercy was quiet for a long while.
“For your sake, I’ll try to be nicer.”

Once Mercy was asleep, Yuki went to
the common room to wait for Lou. She’d been dozing on and off all day, so she
wasn’t particularly tired. When Park came out for his shift, she explained the
controversy.

Holding a tea bulb, Park shook his
head. “No. No. No good.” Pushing over to the snowflake, he knocked on the
helmet. When Lou came out, the Korean drive theorist said, “The flow lines are
directional
,
from the lower mass to the higher.”

“Oh, shoot. So if both ends of the
green line are exits, we can’t use it?”

“In networks, that’s called a sink.
We can’t escape that system. If they’re both entrances, unless we start there,
it doesn’t work either.” Park took a snapshot of the pilot’s workspace and spent
his time adding arrows, waking Sojiro to do legwork on a traditional computer.

Overnight, Red isolated and categorized
each system—origins, sinks, pass-throughs, branches, and out-of-bounds. Then
she boxed groups of systems that led only into the sinks, and labeled them
sinks as well. Nodes leading out-of-bounds were marked uninteresting by the
same process of contagion. She simplified the entire map of the region for that
time period.

Sojiro kept up the simplification
process by computer.

When Zeiss came out to take his
shift, he was awed by the progress. “It will take another day, but this we can
solve. You guys have done so much. Good job.” Turning to Yuki, he said, “Get a
picture of the whole team under this map; it’s a work of art.”

Once Zeiss annotated the most
likely solution, they all posed under the bubble diagram. “We still have a
major experiment to perform, but we’re going to pass the test.”

At the commander’s request, Yuki transmitted
her third photo to Mori Research, with the caption, “Map from Saturn subspace
nexus to midway.”