Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 8

Godswar: The Mask of Ares, Author’s Note and Prologue

And so today we begin snippeting Godswar: Mask of Ares, the first in a dualogy taking place on the same world as, and essentially in parallel with, the Balanced Sword trilogy!

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GODSWAR: The Mask of Ares

By Ryk E. Spoor

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

     My world of Zarathan is something of a potpourri of all fantasy elements, and some SF ones as well, as readers of the Balanced Sword trilogy know. This is intentional. Few of the elements that look familiar are exactly what they appear to be, and even references to real-world people, places, or things are changed to make them work as I want them to in my stories.

This is of course the case with the pseudo-Greek elements of the country of Aegeia. Readers should recognize that in NO WAY is this story intended to reflect any real aspects of Grecian history, culture, or mythology. In-universe, it's assumed that the Earthly versions of the pantheons seen herein were in some way inspired or derived from those of Aegeia, but this is obviously untrue in real life. Readers who know some more personal details of my history will also recognize another source for Aegeia and some of its features, but those, too, have been changed to fit my world and my story.

 

 

Prologue.

     The door swung open to reveal a most beloved figure, and Ares was on his feet immediately, sweeping Athena into his arms for a hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Sister! Oh, I'm so glad you stopped by!"

As with all the gods of the Aegeian pantheon, what the Lady of Wisdom looked like varied – on the mortal world, with whatever body she was incarnate, and here, with the viewer's own interpretation of what they sensed. To Ares, she looked like a tall, well-muscled woman, broad of shoulder, high of brow, gray or green of eye, with tumbling, uncontrollable curls of bronze cascading around a strongly defined face, a shade darker and considerably more olive in tone than the hair. Her dark brows rose in aristocratic arches above a very slightly curved nose.

Ares knew that when she looked at him, she saw a man slightly taller than she, with skin more bronze than olive, black hair, and a long face that allowed for exaggerated expressions of joy or sorrow or rage, dressed in a fancy set of robes that mimicked the armor of his deific persona.

"How could I not stop by before I must leave?" she asked, smiling back.

The words jolted him, sent a momentary spurt of denial through him. "What? No, darling, it can't be that late… can it?"

"I'm afraid so, brother mine. I know you lose track of time, but it really is that time. The Cycle begins anew, and none too soon."

"Oh, Thunder and Fire, I've got so much to do! Deimos… Deimos, there you are, look, get my favorite sister something – Essence of Song, perhaps?" She flashed a smile both to him and to the small, blade-thin, blond youth who had emerged at Ares' call. "Yes, Essence of Song, I knew it was one of your favorites! By the other pantheons, why didn't you warn me?"

She accepted the glass of sparkling, singing light from Deimos. "I did, you scatterbrain. Twice in the past decade."

"Oh." Vague memory broke through. "Oh, yes, you did. Forgive me, 'Thena, I'm every bit the scatterbrain. Time to stop that, though, the Cycle calls, I've got to get in tune with who I am this time. I'm supposed to be down and incarnate before you, right?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, of course you are. That's why I had to stop by, I saw your invitation to a party next month and I knew you—"

"The party, oh no, I'll have to cancel! How embarrassing." Ares cringed inwardly, thinking of all the apologies he was going to have to write. Battles are so much easier than facing your own faux pas. "So you're not really leaving just yet?"

"No, not yet." She smiled again. "I'll make sure you have the usual head start. We have our conflict to play out, after all."

"What of Father…?" As always, he felt a momentary spark of hope, quashed again when Athena shook her head.

"It's been Cycles, Ares," she said gently. "I don't know if he's ever coming back. If he is… well, no one knows where he went, or why. But he's definitely not here for this Cycle, so we have to play out the script as it lies."

He sighed. "Well, we have time for a few drinks, and dinner, and conversation. Now that you've recalled me to myself a bit, I realize it's been a decade or three. What have you been up to?"

*****

"You seem cheered, Lord Ares," Deimos said, helping Phobos – a woman as dark all over as Deimos was pale, and twice as broad – clear up the table and get the dishes put away. "I'd thought the approach of the Cycle might depress your spirits."

"Oh, it does, on occasion, but my sister never fails to lift them. You'll come to see that yourself, if you make it a few Cycles."

"I certainly hope I will!"

His companion echoed that sentiment, looking nervous.

Ares shook his head, grinning, and stood, casting the fancy robes aside as he headed for a huge, gold-inlaid closet at the far side of the room. "I hope so as well, but do not fear; the roles of Deimos and Phobos are strenuous, truly, but even if the cost of the Art is to die on the stage of the world, rest assured that your spirits will be caught with the most gracious gentleness and conveyed directly to Elysium. But the last pair performed for, oh, many Cycles indeed before they were forced to pass to their reward. You'll meet them, I'm sure – wouldn't want their advice to be lost, you know."

"But you do not pass, Lord?"

"Me? Well… not as you might, no," he admitted, flinging the doors wide and studying the arms and armor displayed, in glittering array, within. Which ones? What is the spirit of this age? Please don't let it be one in which I'm a crude ravager, those are so boring. Easy to play, but deathly dull, and I despise dull.

"No, not quite as you might," he repeated. "The outline of the contest – between the God of War and Passion on one side, and the Goddess of War and Wisdom on the other – you both know well already, of course. And in the climax of the Great Work, often I must fall, usually to my sister's hand, though sometimes to the God-Warriors themselves. But as the High Gods, we are known to be merely felled for the moment, to rise inevitably again. Others, alas, often pass beyond the living world and do not easily return."

"But… Elysium is real, yes?" Phobos asked, her voice tense and uncertain.

He turned from the closet and crossed the distance in three quick strides, dropping to his knees before her and taking both her hands. "Lady Phobos, I had not realized… you were a traveler, an Adventurer, but not of us, of course, when you found yourself caught up in the … recruitment, shall we say. What were you? A follower of ours, or…?

"Honestly?" She grinned hesitantly. "Chromaias and the Four. Kharianda was my main patron among the gods."

He gave a nod. "Ahh, of course. One of our strongest allies among the other gods, along with Terian and the King of Dragons. And Lady Kharianda herself, ahh, a fine one for a great warrior to follow. I suppose she must have transferred her blessing to us when you were Chosen." He concentrated, smiled. "Yes, I can remember it now. The end of a prior Cycle is always a bit blurry when a new one is about to begin, but yes, she did; her favor still follows you."

He frowned. "But where was I? Oh! Yes, my lady, Elysium is as real as this palace you stand within, as real as the world you left behind and will return to with me. You need not fear death; my arm – the arms of all of us of Aegeia – is about you and shall guide you there, if need be."

He looked into her eyes, saw that his words had reached her, and nodded, stood again and resumed his contemplation of the costumes. "Remind me, Lady, before we leave; I shall have a word with the Lord of the Underworld and he will show you Elysium – and your predecessors, that you may know that the word 'reward' is real and true – as it is for all mortals who are forced to a final performance in the Great Play." He rubbed his chin. "But for now, you may both retire. I'll finish that cleaning, no need to trouble yourselves. I've work to do, a performance to contemplate."

"As you wish, Lord Ares." The two bowed – he could see it from the corner of his eye – and departed, shutting the golden doors behind them.

After another ten minutes, he sighed and turned to the various dishes left. "Somehow, I'm not quite … getting this Cycle's … oh, vibe," he murmured to himself. "Should have started meditating on it a year ago. Now I have to catch up. Poor Athena, she has to put up with this every Cycle. I really need to do better. Maybe some kind of automated alarm… I'm sure Hephaestus could put one together. Yes, I'll talk to him about that on the morrow."

Naturally he could have cleaned everything up with a gesture – a trivial exercise for even the least of gods, after all – but that wasn't style. You had to get your hands dirty – had to do the work yourself – or what work was it, really?

And there was a certain pleasure in scrubbing dirt away, leaving something clean and sparkling for another day. He hummed and let his mind wander for a bit.

Really, he looked forward to the beginning of every Cycle. The ageless performance, the Eternal Play that helped affirm the places of the gods for the mortals they served, and in turn reinforced the power that made them gods… it was the very core of Aegeia, and he took great joy in the fact that he could serve in such a crucial role, teaching people the dangers of passion and anger uncontrolled, while reminding them of that same passion within themselves! The other gods of the Pantheon played their parts, certainly (well, alas, not Father, not these many Cycles past), but he and Athena had long since become the centerpieces, the core and crucial contest and conflict that drove the entire play.

There were, of course, the other gods – the hundreds and more that watched over, manipulated, defended, or exploited the other peoples of Zarathan – but while they might have more freedom in some ways, and in the case of a few greater power, they did lack one thing: resistance to the effects of the legendary Chaoswars. The Cycle did resist those effects – not completely, but more than any other power on Zarathan. The Goddess of Wisdom retained much knowledge that the others lost. It was, Ares thought, a fair trade that their Father had arranged, harnessing the powers underlying the Chaoswars to create a faster, controlled Cycle.

And the Cycle did also allow them to learn and adapt to their worshippers, as their needs and beliefs and perceptions of the gods changed. It changed the Great Script, enough to keep the Play fresh over all these repetitions. It even had given them flexibility and presence of … power, one might say… sufficient to project themselves occasionally to Zahralandar, the sister world now cut off almost entirely from magic, and leave at least a hint of the existence of the gods, along with the few other deities who detected the momentary opportunity by fortune or fate.

Yes, now he was starting to anticipate the role!

He did allow himself to cheat the tiniest bit and dried the dishes with a gesture, so he could put them away quickly. He bobbled one, nearly dropped it, caught it just before it hit, and sighed with relief.

These dishes – unlike most to be found throughout Olympia – were in fact real, solid objects, brought from Zarathan's surface, just like Deimos and Phobos had been. Much of Olympia was the stuff of gods, thoughts and primal energy made real, yet seen through the lens of individual perception. Ares preferred, in his own quarters, to have a lot of mortal, solid artifacts; they were ideal performance props, reminding him of the essence of the world he served, and that served him as the perfect stage.

And that was true of his costumes, of course. He returned to that closet. But this time, almost instantly his eye was drawn to a flamboyant suit of armor. He felt a smile broadening. Oh, my, what fun I will have! Such potential for being a complete and utter scenery-chewer this time!

The undergarments and padding were, of course, kept with every suit, so he could don the armor immediately. With the armor came the weapons; while the ancient tradition equipped him with a simple sword and spears and such, this version of the role gave him an almost ridiculously massive sword, a battleaxe, a jagged-pointed spear, and other over-the-top accoutrements.

He couldn't help chuckling as he put them on. They would be effective, of course – Hephaestus and the god-power could make a scythe as swift and deadly as a rapier, a stylus strike as viciously as a lance. He wondered if Athena would be as exaggerated in her heroism, or be deliberately more understated, to provide dramatic contrast. It was hard to guess; it was, after all, the mortals' souls who wrote the ultimate script, but even they couldn't explain, exactly, why the changes were made. They simply… were.

He heard the door open quietly, turned to see a familiar slender form.

Deimos bowed. "I wanted to make sure you would require no more of us tonight."

"I thank you, but no, I believe I am content for now. You would be wise to go to your rest – the role has begun to speak to me, and the curtain will be rising soon!"

Deimos smiled back. "I look forward to learning my role."

"It is well." He looked down, adjusting his harness just so.

It was only the instincts of a thousand thousand battles that saved him, a flicker of too-fast motion just at the edge of awareness – a motion that should have been sensed, should have been anticipated, by the god-power, but was not.

Still, he was Ares, God of War, and he was armed and armored, and his sword caught the blade scant inches from his chest, whipped around, sent the black blade flying, and nearly took Deimos' head from his body; the youth bent back, supple as a willow-wand, and Ares' weapon passed not a hair's breadth from his nose, shaving stray golden hairs that had failed to fall as fast as their owner.

Ares leapt back, calling his shield with a simple effort of will; an assassin, once committed, had no choice but to press on. "What treachery is this, Deimos?"

"Oh, treachery long planned, Ares," the slender yellow-haired youth answered, an uncharacteristically savage grin on his face. "Longer than I wanted, honestly," he went on, and Ares saw the ebony blade fly back to Deimos' hand. "You've spent years doing nothing but your idiotic parties and plays… Demons, but I have been wondering how a useless fop like you could possibly be the God of War." The smile sharpened. "But it seems you are more than a popinjay, eh?"

Ares reached out his senses … and immediately knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. To all appearances, Deimos was but an ordinary human. But that should not be true; he had been enhanced when selected, and even leaving that aside, no ordinary human could possibly have entered Olympia without much help.

Could he have had help? Are there any here who would truly wish me ill? The thought was terribly upsetting, but with an assassin in his chambers, it was a necessary thought.

But even if he admitted the possibility that one of the others of the Pantheon wanted him dead, the idea that they'd send a mortal, even a very, very skilled mortal, was ludicrous.

Deimos darted in, so fast that human eyes could never have followed him, and Ares backpedaled, barely able to parry the storm of strikes; then his assailant withdrew, and they circled, each seeking a weakness. And he is definitely no human. Yet I sense no power from him. He moves at speeds beyond mortal, strikes with the force of a giant in the frame of a child, yet I sense…

A chill of horror crept down his spine. Few indeed were the beings who could use their power so well, yet hide it so perfectly. He concentrated, sent out a pulse of the godspower in the form of a message, an alarm, precisely and only attuned to his sister.

The alarm – the very power that composed it – vanished in midair.

And now I know my adversary.

He called the power up, keeping it within himself, not allowing it to go beyond the bounds of his body. With the speed of Zeus' lightning, he streaked back into the armory, pursued by the thing calling itself Deimos. His right hand released his sword, reached out, caught up another blade, as his left arm raised the red-and-gold shield, took a blow from the black knife. The blade carved three inches into the rim of the shield – but that bound it for just the briefest moment.

And in that instant his new sword – glittering, pure silver – struck, cleaving Deimos' head in twain.

For a moment he stood, staring down at the grisly sections of his assailant's head, each hanging from part of the neck, then withdrew the sword.

The body staggered back, then, impossibly, flipped away from him, the head re-forming and smiling, the teeth now longer, shining, glistening like crystal. "Oh, very good, Ares, you're not so bad as I thought!" The voice wavered on the edge of a laugh; it did giggle, and the sound was oh, very not sane.

Ares felt the horror closing in on him. How? I was sure that would kill it! Did I guess wrong? But then what…?

His knees wobbled, and without warning it was nearly impossible to stand, as though…

"…as though your very strength were being drained? Precisely, Ares!" There was now just a line, a faint scar, down the center of Deimos' head. "Oh, you did think fast, bravo for your performance!" A slow series of claps, with the mouth broadening, teeth growing longer. "You were even … almost … right."

The transformation accelerated, and the figure loomed up above Ares. He fought desperately to move, to escape, but now he was on his knees. It bent down, immense, sparkling fangs inches from the throat of the god, and breathed out three more words, the breath hot and hungry.

"But only almost."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Castaway Resolution: Chapter 30

This is the final chapter I'm posting -- we've reached the halfway point in the novel! If you can't wait to see the rest, the eARC of the novel is up now at Baen; otherwise, Castaway Resolution will be out in early March!

 

The castaways had a couple problems...

 

Chapter 30.

"We're going to start moving out of here now," Campbell said. "Just shot up one of those stinging-worm things, and the air here's gone way beyond foul, it's getting' toxic."

"But we can't just stop work on getting Emerald Maui home!" Sakura said sharply.

"Calm down, Saki, ain't no one saying anything like that. But we gotta start packin' and get out of here. It's not safe in any way. Move on down the coast, this side where it's nearer them anyway, while we keep givin' them support."

"The Sergeant is right," Laura said. "It's not like any of us are physically able to do anything for those kids." He could see her pain-filled wince at having, once more, to admit that Francisco and Hitomi were, in the end, on their own on Lincoln's seas. "All we can do is advise them, and we can do most of that while we're still working."

"I think the idea of rafting everything makes sense," Pearce Haley said. "The way the continent's moving and the water currents work, they'll help us move in the direction we want to go."

"Agreed, and like we noticed, lots of downed trees." Campbell surveyed the area, making sure there weren't any more opportunistic predators lurking about. "Xander, any progress?"

"It's a column shard, Sergeant. Got jammed right in there, probably during the tumbling."

"Can the kids get it out?" That was, of course, the only question that mattered. If they couldn't remove the shard, Emerald Maui was dead in the water—at least, unless they could figure out some new jury-rig trick. But at some point, you ran out of tricks.

"I think so. I hope so. There's no sign that it's seriously damaged the jet, so that should mean it's jammed but not held in by, say, splinters of the fans or anything. If they can get a line around it and hook the block-and tackle on, I'd bet that it could be pulled out, especially if the pull's pretty straight."

"Block and tackle?" Pearce asked, eyebrows high. "Why not just use the winch connection?"

"External connectors are totally fouled, maybe just scoured off like the antennas. And they can't open the cargo doors while they're floating, so the internal connector won't work unless they set up the tackle to relay through the ship—way too many ways for that to go bad." Xander gagged as a particularly foul gust of wind blew by. "Jesus."

"Even with nanosuppression, this stuff is rich. We'll be burning our clothes after we move, you bet." Campbell nodded. "All right, sounds like we have a plan for the blockage. How long to get it set up?"

"Figure it all out and get Hitomi and Franky on the job? A day. Worst part's going to be getting the cable on the fragment; we'll try doing it without anyone going in the water, but I have a bad feeling that it just won't work."

Campbell saw Xander's face three shades paler than normal, and knew he was reliving his own near-death experiences. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," he said after a moment. "Get everything arranged. Tavana, you said you had Franky and Hitomi working outside already?"

"Yes, Sergeant. Once we saw that the comm channel connections looked to be clean, I thought maybe we could make new antennas. They would maybe not be efficient, but all we need is a nice long strip of conductor that is connected to the radios."

"And?"

"And so Hitomi, she found a roll of repair cable which has the all-weather tape built in. Models show it should work as a good dipole antenna. Hitomi just finished taping it down, and now she's painting it over with goop."

"Goop", in this context, meant a radio-transparent, hard-drying aerospace epoxy-like substance that was a standard across known space. Every ship carried some for general repairs, smoothing of nicks and dents, and so on. It hadn't changed much in anything but detail since the twenty-first century.

 

"Well, then it'd darn well better work, 'cause you ain't getting that goop off again."

"Pretty sure it will. Once it dries—about twenty minutes—Franky's going to go out and do the connections. Probably have to do soldering, there's no actual connectors left."

"And then?"

"Drop some goop on the connections to keep them safe from sea spray and such, and then we should be good to go. We'll know once he does the hook-up whether it works; Emerald Maui's onboard systems will automatically try to connect to the network."

"Here's hoping. We'll all feel one hell of a lot better once we know they can always talk to us, even when the doors are closed."

"God, yes," Laura said.

"All right, then. I'll need all the strongest people here to move stuff—that means me, Xander, Tav, and Laura. The rest of you, start packing up everything we can bring. Making a raft shouldn't take too long, even with the tools we've got left; at least both groups kept a bunch of the smaller stuff above water level, and your long-suffering winch is still with us." He grinned. "Got more work out of that than the manufacturer ever guessed, I'll bet."

"That is for sure," Akira's voice said, transmitted from inside Sherwood Tower. The temporary stairs and platform over the nigh-endless pit below allowed them to go in and out, but Campbell had agreed with the engineer's evaluation. Eventually that tower was coming down, even if the kids hadn't wanted to admit it. Moving now was just getting a jump ahead of disaster.

"And everyone stay in their groups if you are not in one of the towers in a defensible position," he said. "Just takes one second for something hungry to get the drop on you."

"Got it, Sergeant," said Maddox.

"Pearce, you'll be in charge of the packing," Laura said. "Everyone else clear on that?"

There was a chorus of yeses from Sakura, Melody, Caroline, and Maddox. "Yes," Akira added with good humor.

"Good. We'll all leave our omnis on. First, let's get all the tools and stuff we'll need—rope's top of the list, but we'll want hammers, things like that."

It didn't take long to fill a pack for everyone—both with the tools and materials Campbell thought they'd need, and with food and water for the day. Turning away from the clearing, Campbell began to lead the way towards the shore. Here at ground level the going was incredibly hard, with still-soft mud, tumbled obstacles, most things still a uniform grey-brown of mud which made it difficult to tell where one thing left off and another began. It was particularly bad when you thought something was a rock and it turned out to be a partially-decayed corpse of some unfortunate animal. What I wouldn't give for my Pathfinder boots now, a whole case of 'em.

"So. . . uck. . . Sergeant, we're making a raft. You've done that before?"

"Oh, sure. Survival training's got that as one of the basics. There's all sorts of rafts you can make, but for this we'll want one that's pretty sturdy, carries a lot of weight. Several logs across, pretty long. Have to lay some kind of deck on it—think we might have some pieces left in storage that might do, we'll get those once we have the main raft assembled—then rig up a simple mast, sail, rudder—maybe just a steering board or steering oar—an' some poles for near-shore work."

"Sounds like it could be a little complicated."

Campbell grinned, remembering. "Nah. Hard work, that I'll grant, and some of it gets a little fiddly if you want everything just right, but it's mostly getting it right the first time that matters. Don't want to have to go back and try to re-do part of your raft; gets messy." He slipped and barely caught himself before taking a full faceplant into the muck. "Not that anyone here will notice 'messy'."

Laura snickered, turning it into a cough. "No, I don't suppose we will. The logs will still float covered in this. . . stuff?"

"We'll roll 'em in the water, get 'em cleaned off first, but sure, they will. Takes time to get waterlogged. Dependin' on how the decay works here, we might end up with 'em stripping their bark as we roll 'em, which wouldn't be a bad thing."

Tavana came to a half-fallen tree blocking the way; rather than go around, he shoved it up and over, sending it down with a resounding thud-splat that sent mud all over the party. "Whoops."

"Watch it, Tav. This stuff's bad enough to smell, ain't none of us want to eat it." That boy is strong, though. Not sure I could've tossed that tree like that, and I've got thirty centimeters on the kid. He started out a little round, but he's turning into a regular brick.

"Sorry, Sergeant, everyone."

"It's okay, Tav. Not like I'm really noticing another spot of this crud," Xander said. "I'd be more worried about people getting hurt, though. If that log turned out to be heavier than you thought, or fell the wrong way. . ."

"Yes, I know, it was stupid. I will not do that again." Tavana's voice was serious. Good, he's taking it the right way. With teenagers you were never sure whether they'd take a lesson to heart, or just take it badly instead.

The air was slightly less foul now as they approached the coast. Their floating continent was drifting through the ocean, leaving some of the wreckage behind and replacing it with cleaner water. The four of them stood on the shore for a moment, just taking the time to breath less-tainted air.

"All right, that'll do. Let's get this going." He looked around. "We'll want. . . eight, ten logs that size," he said, pointing at one tree about thirty to forty centimeters in diameter. "Keep 'em as close to the same width as possible. At the same time, keep an eye out for smaller logs, maybe around ten centimeters; we'll use those for the crossmembers to secure 'em together."

"How long should the logs be?"

"Four meters or so. We'll trim the ends a bit to make a prow when we're done, so maybe go for five meters."

"You sure this thing will fit all of us and our gear?"

"This'll be a cargo carrier. A few of us on board at any time, the rest'll swim or walk and be ready to help pull her in if something goes wrong. It'll carry all the stuff we've got left in one, maybe two trips at most."

He paired with Laura, Tav with Xander. Between the four of them, it only took a few hours to locate and drag ten good-sized logs to the water's edge. Xander collapsed onto a cleaner section of shore. "Whoosh! Time for a break."

"Sure is. Everyone take ten. Maybe twenty. Eat something, get some water in you. This stuff takes it out of you quick."

"Sergeant? Sergeant Campbell, do you hear me?"

"Francisco? Sure, I hear you, son."

A whoop of triumph almost pierced his eardrums from one side to the other. "¡Funciona! It works!"

"Ow! Down about ten notches, son. Wait, you mean you're calling from Emerald Maui?"

"Si! Yes! We are inside with the lock shut tight!"

He felt a broad grin on his face. "Well, that's just great! You kids did fantastic! Xander, can you confirm a connection straight through to Emerald Maui?"

"Got it! Signal quality's so-so, but well within our ability to work with. If we can get any kind of decent eyes to work with there, and get that engine working, we can bring her home now!"

"That took longer than I thought it was going to," Laura said. "Did you have any problems?"

"Oh, you did not hear me talking to him on the private channel?" Tavana asked. "The solder, it would not stick at first, kept coming off. I did not know that Francisco knew words like those. Finally we figured out how to clean and prep the surface right, though, and the solder flowed on fine."

"So long as it worked, that's what matters. Now you kids can sleep safe inside and still reach us if you have to. Makes us all feel better. And we can run parts of things from here direct. Good work, you two."

"Thank you, Mr. Sergeant," Hitomi said with a giggle.

"I'll 'Mister Sergeant' you, young lady." He laughed with her. "Well, take it easy for a bit. Next big thing won't be 'till tomorrow. Meanwhile, we've still got work to do here."

"Be kind of ironic if we end up getting Emerald Maui back like right after we finish this raft," Xander said.

"Yeah, but I prefer that kind of irony to the kind where we end up without raft or shuttle."

"True enough. Now what, Sergeant?

He looked around the shoreline. "Well, first what we do is see if we can drive some shorter poles into the seabed here, just to keep the logs in a sort of corral. Make it easier than trying to herd 'em all the time. Then we get all the big logs lined up, tie 'em together so they keep pretty much in position."

Laura nodded. "After that?"

"That's where the smaller ones come in. Lay those crosswise, top an' bottom, and tie 'em together, rope between each gap, so they clamp the logs in between 'em. Then we tie the front and back tight, wind a little rope around each gap, too. Then we'll put on our deck, mast and sail, and steering, and we'll be set. Figure we can finish the first part today, then come back in the morning with the deck plating and get her ready to go. First trip, maybe as early as tomorrow evening, but we won't move out with cargo until day after."

"Then tonight we pick out the spot to move to," Laura said. "Akira, hon?"

"Yes?"

"You and Caroline are probably the best to pick out our next home—I want you looking over all the satellite imagery of the coast and let us know where we'll be going."

"We will certainly do that," Akira answered. "I've already noted some promising spots nearby; as long as we've cleared the area of the impact flood by more than a kilometer or so we should be fine, but I'm recommending we move to a distance past the mountain ridge. It won't be a long distance by water, although obviously those walking or wading will have a harder time of it."

"That's quite a few kilometers of harder time, Akira," Campbell said after a moment. "What are you not telling us?"

A pause. "Let us say that I am not sanguine about the chances that this portion of our continent will be entirely intact. While there was no immediate obvious damage on the level of the impact damage we saw on your prior island, the inundation severely impacted a vast majority of the trees and, I believe, columns on this portion of the island. All the debris may also be choking off the living coral-like organisms that underlie much of the land we walk on.

"And while it was only at the very tip of this continent, we had sustained another impact in the not too distant past; that's where our circular harbor came from. So there may be lingering effects from that damage that would be exacerbated by the tsunami."

"You're saying that in your view it's possible that a large part of our continent might become terra non grata to the rest."

"It is possible. And we know what happens to those parts of our floating landmasses."

"That's. . . just peachy. When'd you come up with this theory? 'Cause I think we should've started moving earlier, if that was the case."

"Not much earlier than now; the more immediate survival issues rather outweighed it. I started thinking on this in detail at the point you started talking about us having to move, in fact."

"All right. In that case, just makes it even more imperative we complete the move. So we'll press on and you'll finish choosing our new home. Looking forward to seeing what you pick out. You know everything to look for."

"Sound columns, nearby water supply, signs of game, possibly higher ridges to serve as wave breaks just in case there is another occurrence, flat areas for farming, and so on, yes."

"Carry on then, Doctor." He rose up and futilely slapped away some of the omnipresent mud. "Well, then, let's get back to it; we have a raft to finish!"

 

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 30 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 29

They needed to figure out how to get their little ones home...

-----

 

Part 4: RESCUES

Chapter 29.

Sakura tried to ignore the telltales at the corner of her omni's display. Maybe I shouldn't leave them there at all.

But the idea of not having an eye on her best friend ever was intolerable. And really, she just had to remind herself that there wasn't any reason to keep checking every second. Whips was in suspension, his metabolism slowed to something like a hundredth of normal. That didn't entirely apply to other aspects of his injuries, of course—he wasn't going to live a hundred days, or even half that, in the suspension—but they had time now, and that was what they needed more than anything.

What was important was to figure out how to get Emerald Maui back.

"Ready, Hitomi, Franky?"

"Ready," the two said. Francisco didn't even complain about the shortened nickname, something he usually did without fail.

Sakura triggered the engine cycle, forward, back, forward, back, as fast as the motor could safely shift direction. The idea was to unstick the, well, whatever-it-was that was currently jamming the portside jet.

Unfortunately, even after several different cycle patterns, there wasn't much sign of change. Whatever was caught in the jet was tough, and wasn't going to be easily dislodged. She sat back in frustration and drew in a breath.

She regretted the deeper breath immediately. The mud and wreckage, filled with innumerable corpses of creatures large and small, was acquiring an increasingly terrible stench. "Ugh. Mom, can I adjust my smell nanos again?"

"Go ahead, Saki. Though even with the best discrimination work, that means you'll lose more of your sense of taste too."

She grimaced. Taste and smell were so closely intertwined that you couldn't mess with the one without affecting the other. So dulling your senses to all the organic components of that vile smell. . .

"Well. . . for now, anyway. I need to focus on the work. But we can't stay like this forever, Mom."

"Hate to say it, but Saki's right, Ma'am," Sergeant Campbell said. "We don't have the cleanup crews a city'd have to get this muck out of here, and it's going to be months before it starts to get better on its own."

"We have to leave Sherwood Tower?" Melody's incredulous shout made Sakura jump, as it came from right behind her.

"Jeez! Don't do that, Mel!"

"But we did so much work," Melody said. It was a mournful sound, so like a dirge that Sakura almost laughed; Mel had gotten a lot better at throwing herself into projects and actually putting forth effort, but that wasn't her natural tendency, and the old, unreformed Melody's voice was the one lamenting all the hours of effort put into Sherwood Tower.

"I'm afraid the Sergeant's right," Pearce said. "We've already seen a couple of those giant worms coming up to scavenge, and the combination of new scavenger threats and whatever this. . . mess is going to do in terms of disease and such? We'll have to move; we won't even be able to rely on our earlier sources of water—look at Blue Hole."

Sakura bit her lip, nodding involuntarily. From one of the windows of the Tower they could sometimes see Blue Hole Lake, which—before the tsunami—had been a beautiful pure blue, one of the deepest lakes on the explored section of the continent, with at least twenty to thirty meters of pure fresh water overlaying less palatable stuff below.

Now it was a filthy, stinking mud-brown eyesore, no better than the wreckage visible in all other directions. "It's not going to clear up?"

"Eventually, of course," her father answered, obviously listening into the conversations as many of them did. "But this event completely disrupted the balance of Blue Hole and the other two similar lakes on this section of the island. The mud cascaded into them and overturned the thermocline and density barriers; they're not only contaminated, they're brackish. It will be a matter of years, I would guess, before they're back to what we remember."

"I remember how hard it was to make Sherwood Tower the first time," muttered Caroline. "Not looking forward to that again."

"I don't think it'll be that hard," the Sergeant said. "Remember, there's still another excavator, and a lot of other stuff, on Emerald Maui. If we get them back here, it'll solve a lot of our problems, not the least of 'em being safe, clean, accessible shelters, not to mention tools. We've lost a lot of stuff, no arguing that, but we're a long way from having to go the way of re-inventing civilization from the stone age again, like you folks had to. God forbid we ever have to."

"Saki? What about our engine?" Hitomi asked.

Her lips tightened, and she looked up, seeing Tavana across from her in the little room. He didn't look any happier. She cut out the transmission to Emerald Maui. "Tav? Any other ideas?"

He shook his head. "No, Saki. And from what they've been saying, neither do Xander or Maddox or our adult friends. The thing stuck in that engine, it is staying there until someone pulls it out."

Sakura swallowed hard. "You mean Hitomi or Francisco has to go out there and dive? That's. . ." she remembered the story of Xander's near-death experience, and her own family's siege by the raylamps. "That's crazy."

"Crazy or not, he's probably right," Laura said. "None of us can get there. The only one of us who could have reasonably safely gotten to them on his own was Whips."

"But that, it is not entirely true," Tavana said. "We could make a raft, or maybe an outrigger canoe, like my own ancestors did. It would not be an easy thing, but we could get there fairly quickly."

"Hmmm. Maybe, Tav," Xander said. "But first, with the limited tools we have left, it'd take quite a while to make a seaworthy canoe or raft, and second, Emerald Maui's in a current that's taking her in a different direction from our continent. So you'd have to either have good winds for a sail, or be able to paddle like mad to catch up to her."

Sakura saw Tavana's face fall. "It was a good idea, Tav, but I don't think we have the time to try it," she said, trying to comfort him. But that reminds me—how's it possible that Emerald Maui is in a current and we aren't? Shouldn't we all be drifting the same way?"

"You'd think so," Caroline spoke up. "But I think you're forgetting what we're really drifting on. This floatcoral continent is like an iceberg—there's a lot more below us than there is above the water. So my guess is that the lower parts of the continent—the keel of our boat, you could say—are in a deeper-water current that covers a lot more area, or maybe is stronger, than the surface one that Emerald Maui is caught in."

"Oye, everyone, we still need help here!" Francisco's voice was sharper than usual, and Sakura smiled ruefully.

"You're right, Francisco," she said. "Okay, first we'll need to get a look at what you're dealing with. That means someone's going to have to go out and put an omni or some other camera into the water near the rear jet that's not working. If we get some good imagery we can figure out what needs to be done."

"That's me," Hitomi said."

"Why you?" Francisco asked.

"'Cause you've been doing all the outside stuff, and now it's my turn," Hitomi said reasonably.

She could see Francisco turning that over in his head in the view from Hitomi's omni, then he grinned and shrugged. "Okay, yes, we all have to do the work. I will hold the safety rope and you will put the camera in the water." He looked at the tiny girl with a concern that echoed Sakura's own. "But are you sure? If you're out there, one of the raylamps might come for you."

"Francisco has a point, Hitomi," Sakura heard her mom say. "Honey, no one doubts you're one of the bravest here, but Francisco's a lot bigger than you."

"Mr. Sergeant Campbell –"

A snort of laughter. "That's Mister Campbell or Sergeant Campbell, honey, not both mashed up together."

"Sorry," said Hitomi, sounding genuinely contrite. "I thought Sergeant was your first name, Mr. Campbell."

"Ha! Of course you did. But go on, what about Mr. Sergeant Campbell?"

"Well, you told me that that's why you taught us to use guns. 'Cause they make it not important who's bigger."

Sakura felt her eyebrows raise, but Campbell simply chuckled again. "Well, you're right about that, Hitomi. And you and Francisco've done pretty well learning. But using a gun in a fight, that's a lot different than plinking at a target, you understand, Hitomi?"

Her image nodded in the omni's view. Then Franky's viewpoint slewed around and they saw another raylamp, slowly approaching up the the hull of Emerald Maui. Franky picked it off with a single shot that sent the scavenger plummeting back into the water.

"I know. But I've been watching Francisco. I can do this and I don't want to stay inside all the time!"

Sakura looked up to her mother, who had just entered the room. "Mom?"

"I'm thinking, Saki." It didn't take any special effort to see the frown on Mom's face, or guess what she was thinking. But finally Laura Kimei drew in a huge breath, and nodded. "You're right, Hitomi. We're trusting both you and Franky—Francisco, sorry—to get the job done. It's going to take both of you, maybe at some point both of you at once in the water, much as that terrifies me, to get Emerald Maui running in time to save Whips. Francisco, you belay her good."

"I will. Promise."

Fortunately, along with the cheap omnis had been a few view extenders—simple descendants of the "selfie stick" of the early smartphone era. The extenders had some other useful features, but the important one now was the original function: allowing the user to put the camera somewhere they, personally, couldn't reach. Hitomi put one of the spares onto an extender and tested it; the unit easily linked in and showed the little blonde girl standing next to a worried-looking Francisco. Well, good. I want him worrying about my little sister!

To her credit, Hitomi didn't look like she was all smiles; her expression was sober. She's done a lot of growing up. Not the wandering distracted girl she was when we first landed.

"Good pics there," the Sergeant said. "Tav, can you highlight where she's going to have to put the stick?"

"Oui, I can do that easily. Hitomi, when you get outside, the engine area will be highlighted. Your omni will show you where to put the extender into the water, and it'll guide you to holding it just in the right place." He hesitated a moment. "You're going to have to go over the support so you can get a rear view of the engine, too. Both you and Francisco keep an eye out when you're doing this, right?"

"Right," agreed Hitomi, and Franky echoed her.

"Well, then, no time like the present," Sergeant Campbell said. "Once you're on belay and the rope's secured, get to it."

Sakura watched as the two youngest members of their group got ready for their latest expedition. Francisco was conscientious, seeming to be checking off parts of the preparation from a mental checklist. He insisted on verifying for himself that Hitomi's weapon was properly charged and loaded for use, and had her check his, before he fastened the rope onto the improvised harness they'd made out of cargo straps at Xander's instruction.

Hitomi made an efficient production of yanking and jumping hard against the knot to make sure it would hold, then nodded and stepped out cautiously, the view extender in folded configuration hooked to the harness, her weapon already out. "No raylamps toward the back."

She dropped gently down to the extended outrigger, then moved carefully along until she could reach the second exterior set of handholds and climbed up toward the top of the hull. Francisco paid out the line until she was standing atop Emerald Maui, then said "Wait." She halted and looked back, watching.

Francisco, keeping the rope loosely in his grasp, moved quickly to catch up with Hitomi. He then braced himself and let her move down the hull.

Hitomi moved hesitantly to the base of the shuttle's tail. From her omni's viewpoint, Sakura could see the drive jet, its upper housing just breaking the water's surface. Hitomi stood there, staring at the water and the blue-green tinted curve of the underwater housing. Then she took an audible breath and jumped.

It was a good jump; Hitomi cleared the gap and landed on the small patch of wet composite, skidding a bit but catching onto the support strut and keeping herself from falling into the water. Sakura loosened her own grip, feeling her heart hammering as fast as Hitomi's must be.

Hitomi swallowed hard, that sound also audible to everyone, then steadied herself. With the careful precision that Saki remembered well, she removed the view extender and omni from her harness, stretched it to a length of over two meters, and dipped it into the water.

A split-screen in the omni view showed the underwater imagery. Hitomi rotated the camera slowly, obviously checking to see where raylamps might be hiding. None seemed terribly close to the location. One of Tavana's highlights showed on Hitomi's view, directing her to stand almost directly above and lower the omni to face into the engine.

Saki heard Tavana's indrawn breath echo her own. Something was visible there, sticking half a meter out of the engine housing. Hitomi lowered the omni more, giving them a view of the entire forward jet opening. With Tavana's prompting, Hitomi scanned the camera across the jet three times, then climbed over to the other side and repeated the process from the rear.

As Hitomi was finishing up, Francisco called out, "Hitomi! A raylamp, coming up the support strut!"

The little girl retracted the view extender and turned to study the glistening black creature. It rotated in place, somehow adhering to the vertical side of the strut, and tendrils extended in Hitomi's direction.

Hitomi's hand was on her gun, but she hadn't drawn it, and Sakura could see why. Francisco was visible along a line very close to that of the raylamp; if she missed by even a small amount, she could hit Franky.

Even as the black, gelatinous stingray-shape began to ooze towards her, Hitomi very carefully unsnapped the omni from the extender, and then pointed the shaft at the approaching raylamp.

Without warning, the view extender shot out to its full length of three meters, the blunt tip ripping entirely through the body of the creature. It gurgled and plummeted into the water without a pause.

The impact also drove Hitomi backwards and she teetered on the edge, but Francisco yanked back hard, and Hitomi instead was drawn upward and half onto the support.

"That was close," Sergeant Campbell said after a moment. "But excellent thinking, Hitomi. You really made me proud, there."

"Made us all proud," Laura said, her voice perhaps a little shaky.

"All of us," Sakura echoed. "Now Hitomi, you get inside. Time for use to take a look at this data and figure out how to finally get you moving!"

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 29 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 28

Whips was not well...

-----

 

 

Chapter 28.

"I'm dying, aren't I?" Whips asked over his private channel.

He was pretty sure what the answer was going to be.

Laura was silent for a moment. Then, very quietly, she said, "Yes. Yes, you are, Harratrer. I'm sorry."

"Thought so." He tried to say it casually, but he could hear the pain in his voice too clearly.

"We're working on it," she said. "We're not giving up, and you shouldn't either."

"Got. . . too many things to do to give up," Whips said, studying the side display in his omni. "Franky and Hitomi are getting home and I'll make sure of that, Mom."

The way the sound cut out for a moment told him she'd started to cry. "I know you will, honey. None of my children would let anything happen to them."

"Mom," Whips said, then hesitated. Then he took a big breath—even though that hurt, a lot—and went on. "Mom. . . Laura. . . I love you, you know. All of you."

"Of course I know that!" The flash of anger wasn't directed at him, he knew; it was at the universe that might doubt it.

"Then. . . look, is there really a chance to save me? Really, not just. . . hoping?"

"There is, Harratrer. They've dug up my work on suspension of Bemmius, and I'm putting together the nanoinstruction set now, with help. I can do the updates to your nanos and the gelpacks with your omnis to transmit. It. . . it should work, at least for a while."

"How long?"

Laura's voice shifted to its professional mode. "Estimating the effectiveness is not easy, but . . . I think we can slow your metabolism and other processes enough to make it possible to successfully revive and treat you. . . oh, for at least a week and a half, maybe up to two or three weeks. If the suspension works."

That last line told him how much Laura was pushing the edge of their capabilities. But . . . that's not so different than what we were doing for the last year, is it? "If you get it in time, it'll work. How much worse will I make it if I move?"

"Can you move? With those injuries –"

"Very slowly, yes. With lots of rests. If I use my nanos to reduce the pain and shock I can do some stuff for a while, I think."

"I. . . I really do not like the idea of you risking any movement. Why?"

"I need to work on what's going to get us home. There's links that need to be set up for omni access to the ship controls, and I don't want to try to talk Hitomi or Francisco through it by remote. Maybe we won't need that access, but I'm betting. . ." he took another breath, fighting off the haze that had risen to cloud his thoughts. ". . . um, betting. . . yeah, betting that we will. I can't see a way around doing something that connects us remotely, and the manual controls will be really hard for either of them to use."

She was quiet for several moments; Whips took the time to recover his strength, focus attention on the jobs he was going to have to do. Finally, he heard her sigh. "Harratrer, I've said I don't like the idea. . . but I know you're right. Just. . . be careful. Too much effort, the wrong kind of effort, could make things worse. And we really don't have much margin for 'worse', hon."

"I know. Thanks, Mom. I'll be careful."

He switched to the public channel, even as he sent signals to his internal medical nanos to start reducing pain signals and prevent shock. He also, reluctantly, set up a bunch of interlocks that would cancel the analgesics if there were indications of significantly increased damage. Have to give Laura her chance.

As the pain ebbed, his mind sharpened slightly. Gingerly he tested his ability to move. His rear "pusher" manipulators were in better shape than his front ones, so he could probably push slowly forward. One of his arms was able to move halfway decently. Two of three eyes were usable. "Okay, everyone, this is Whips on Emerald Maui. I'm going to be surveying the nav and comm systems and seeing if I can get them both set up for omni access."

"You sure you can do that?" Xander asked.

"Sure I have to, so I'll do it somehow," he answered.

"We were talking over here and Pearce asked why we couldn't just coach you near to shore with some dead-reckoning—compass on Emerald Maui still works, we've got magnetic poles here, we could give you directions and you stop every so often, open the lock, and let us update the navigation. You wouldn't have to leave the lock open until you got real close."

"No can do," Whips said after a minute. "Here, look at these clips from when Francisco was outside." As they looked, he begain the slow process of inching around the crash couches and heading for the control panel.

"Merde. I see what he means, Xander."

"Yeah," came the Sergeant's voice. "You've got a damn good point there, son. Too much debris of all kinds floating in your way. You'd have to either take major risks or move forward at walking speed. And the currents ain't helping you."

"Right. And we can't see the stuff in front of us with the window scoured the way it is." The port was a milky-white; Whips wasn't sure if they'd be able to see an island-eater through it.

"No way to clear the forward port? If you could just see, someone like Francisco with Hitomi to help would be able to get back to our area pretty easy."

"We'd need a bunch of nanorepair dust to fix the scratches, or maybe a portside polishing rig." He thought a bit. "Maybe, if we could reprogram some of the Nebula Drive dust, but that'd take a while, right?"

"Hold on." There was a flurry of conversation between the more nanoprogramming-conversant members. "About a week and a half is our guess. If it'd work."

"So that's a maybe." He finally pulled up in front of the console, lifted his one arm and, with difficulty, managed to coax the panel to open. "I have to get as much ready here now, before. . . um, before Laura puts me in suspension."

"Right," Campbell said. "You need my auth codes?"

"I had a subset. . . but yes, sir, if you could give me the whole set. . .?"

A low laugh. "Sure, why not? It's not like I have to worry any of you are out to steal the silverware. Stand by for encrypted transmission," he continued on a private channel.

Whips signaled his Omni to be ready. "Secured reception ready."

It was a quick transmission, relayed from a no-frills spare omni that Franky had stuck on the hull just outside of the currently-open door. Whips tested the codes, saw the proper responses. "Got them. Thanks, Sergeant Campbell."

"No problem. Let me know if there's anything else I can get you."

"Intact antennas?" he asked.

"Ha! Fresh out, I'm afraid."

He narrowed one eye and adjusted focus. Yes, that was the right set of panels. Just have to make a few switchovers. He reached out, but his arm was not responding well. His extended fingers brushed the edges of the sunken panel, rebounded. He tried again, found himself almost missing it entirely. After several more attempts, he gave up. "Hitomi, can you help me?"

The little girl was there almost instantly. "What, Whips?"

"See inside that panel?"

She leaned over and looked. "Lots of lights and switches."

"Right. So I'm projecting that into your omni as an overlay—got it?"

"Got it!"

"See the switches I'm marking in red?" It was astonishing how much effort it was taking him to do even simple commands to his omni now.

"Yes."

"Push those switches, and only those switches, over to the left. I mean right! Right!" He felt a twitch in his damaged gut from the surge of emergine as he'd caught his mistake. If I told her to do it wrong and didn't catch it, it might take a long time to realize why things weren't working.

"You sure you mean 'right', Whips?" Hitomi was looking at him, worry writ large across her tiny face.

"Absolutely sure. All the way to the right." He managed to make his one arm touch her right. "This one."

"Okay." A few moments later she stepped back. "Did it!"

"Francisco, see if your omni can connect to the nav controls now. Just connect, don't do anything yet."

There was a pause, then Francisco said from his position near the airlock, "Yes! It shows me controls are unlocked!"

Thank the Skies and Vents. Every time we fiddle with things on Emerald Maui I'm afraid I'll find something else our misadventures have ruined. "Great!"

Whips took a few moments to re-focus. Even with the anesthetizing nanos, his body was telling him how badly injured he was. His mind was sluggish and his motor control wasn't as good as it had been only half an hour ago. "Okay. First things to do. Check integrity of systems. I have the codes, comm systems are now unlocked for full omni access. That one didn't need any physical override switches."

In a voice that was just a little too filled with casual interest, Sakura entered the transmitted conversation. "So why is that, Whips? I mean, why are there physical override switches on the shuttle, instead of just programming?"

"Hmm. You know, I'm not sure. I just know it's true of every vehicle I've ever seen. I think it has something to do with safety. Sergeant?"

"Huh. You've got me stumped too, Saki. Got the same impression as Whips, but can't quite pull it up."

"Goes back to the twenty-first century," Pearce Haley said. "The first full automated vehicles that were deployed were all-computer controlled. And it turned out they could be hacked and controlled from the outside, which got people killed in at least three instances. Resulting law required that there be a physical layer isolating any vehicle meeting certain standards from external signals that could in any way affect the direct operation of the vehicle. In general there's good reasons to keep it that way. For things like Emerald Maui, there are dedicated external communications for automated landing and such, but the bands and communications protocols of omnis are physically excluded, which prevents accidental interference in operations, too."

"Wow," Whips said. "Where did you pick that up, Lieutenant?"

"One of my degrees is actually in criminal justice, as Samuel could tell you, and one term we reviewed the criminal and civil suits surrounding those events."

"Another degree?" Xander sounded both amazed and amused. "I knew you had some military training with the Sergeant, and a lot of medical technician training, and then you surprised us by advising on the best way to extract the ejector charge, and now you're a lawyer?"

Whips felt a little better, having sat still for a few moments. He closed the panel door with only two tries and then keyed in his omni to run the shuttle systems, as Pearce replied "Not a law degree. Criminal Justice, which meant for me that I was qualified for law enforcement and private security positions. Good additions to have in my career."

"Sure seems like it," Whips said. "How'd you end up with the ejection systems knowledge?"

"Studied shipboard systems for crew support and safety as part of my training to work aboard Outward Initiative. Meaning mostly environmentals, but the safety ejection systems of all types were part of that."

"Ooooh," Maddox said with a tone of sudden understanding. "And that saved our lives, didn't it?"

"What. . . oh. Well, yes, I suppose. . . yes, I guess it did." Pearce sounded bemused.

It took a moment, but Whips finally understood what Maddox meant; when LS-88 (later Emerald Maui) had been cut loose from Outward Initiative, part of the boarding tube had remained connected to the shuttle, and it had been Pearce Haley who had figured out how to force the detach by detonating the charges meant for emergency launch. Had she not done so, many of the shuttle's systems would never have switched to internal control.

"Okay, everyone, could we be quiet for a few?" Whips asked. "I've. . . got a few tests to do here. Need to concentrate."

The others went silent. "Franky. . . Francisco, Hitomi, I'm going to test the drive systems. Just in case, I'd like you to come inside and close the door, Francisco."

"I will." Francisco reached up and removed the communications omni from its temporary perch, then triggered the airlock to close. Once it was fully closed and Francisco sitting on one of the seats, he said "Done! Go ahead, Whips!"

The first test was to make sure the rudder worked. It turned exactly as the designs, and prior experience, said it should, so next he checked the jet condition. All indications seemed to be positive, so he activated the jets for a quick burst—not enough to move them more than a few meters, but enough to show they were working.

Instead of the smooth whistling hum, however, there was a buzzing, whizzing noise and an uncomfortable jolt through the cabin. "Vents!"

"What is it, Whips? What's wrong?" Francisco was obviously trying not to sound too worried; Hitomi wasn't saying anything, just watching with her full intensity.

"Not sure. . ." He forced his brain to clear for a moment. "Ummm. . . hm. So that's okay. But that means. . . ugh."

"Should we open the hatch?"

Whips heard the words, but for a moment he couldn't quite figure out what they meant. . . and that scared him. "I. . . yes, Franky. Open it and, um. . . put out the comm omni."

Now what was it. . . oh, yes. "Something's jammed in the portside jet." More buzzing rumbling. "Aaaand it won't come out easily."

"Okay, we'll look over the data, see if we can figure out what it might be and how to deal with it," Sergeant Campbell said. "What about the comm system?"

The world looked . . . different. Kind of . . . ripply, even inside the cabin. That's . . . not good. "Comm system. Right." He triggered the omni to give a status scan. "Huh. Um. . . Yes. The comm system's still mostly, um, running. Antennas are clearly missing. But no shorts, no malfunctions."

"That might be salvageable, then."

"Think. . . maybe, yes." The strength of a few minutes ago had already entirely drained away.

 

"Harratrer," came Laura's voice. "Your vitals are not good. It's time to try to put you in suspension."

"You. . . ready, Mom?"

"Almost. Can you move yourself away from the control area, just in case?"

"Sure." His rear pushers still worked, but they were even more sluggish than they had been a little while ago. Nonetheless, Whips was finally back near the securing points that could be used to lash him down. "Moved."

"Francisco, get one of the Bemmie nanogel packs and bring it over to Whips," Laura said.

"Thought. . . you could do it to my nanos."

"I can and I am," she answered, "but adding more can't hurt."

"They taste terrible."

A laugh that had an edge of tears answered him. "Yes, I know. We don't like the stuff either. But. . . it works."

"I guess. But couldn't. . . um, the kids, couldn't they work the injectors?"

"I don't want them trying injections on you when there are so many injuries all over. This will work well enough, and having a heavy coating of nanos on your internals won't hurt at all."

Francisco was back, though his shape looked strangely dim. Were the cabin lights on? They seemed to be, yet Franky and Hitomi just looked so far away. He did something with his omni—Whips heard, but couldn't quite understand, Laura's instructions—and then brought the pack towards Whips' mouth.

Whips tried to grit his beak shut and the twinge of pain through the anaesthetic momentarily cleared the fog. "Ugh. Okay, just open the top. . . yes, like that." He forced his mouth open. "Just pour it in, I'll swallow."

That was one of the hardest things he'd ever done, he decided. Swallowing nanogel really, really sucked.

Slowly, he felt a sort of strange, distant warmth beginning to envelop him. "M. . .mom?"

"Shh, Harratrer. It's all right. You're going to go to sleep now."

"Franky. . . 'tomi. . ."

"We'll take care of you, Whips," Hitomi said, tears standing out in her eyes even through the rising haze in his mind. "Promise!"

"Promise!" echoed Francisco.

With that word as a talisman, Whips allowed the soft heaviness to claim him and quiet darkness became his world.

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 28 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 27

Well, they'd at least established contact...

 

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Chapter 27.

Relief and fear speared simultaneously through Laura. "Francisco? Thank God! Are all of you all right?"

"Hitomi and I are good, yes. Whips. . . Whips is not good. He cannot move much."

Then Whips' voice—weak and with the burring undertone of pain and exhaustion—came on the comm. "I'm here. . . Mom," he said. She smiled and felt tears start from her eyes at the same time. "Relaying through Francisco's omni—I can link through the open airlock door."

"I'm here, Mommy!" Hitomi said. "Whips is hurt bad, can you help him?"

"I'll do what I can, baby girl. Francisco, are you all safe right now?"

"If nothing big comes after Emerald Maui we are," Francisco answered promptly. "There are raylamps crawling on the outside here, but if I watch them they aren't too dangerous." She could hear the tension in Francisco's voice and knew he was more frightened than he wanted anyone to know.

"The important thing," Campbell said, "is that you're alive. Thank God for that. Whips, we—well, Saki—already guessed the tsunami stripped the exterior antennas. What's your condition otherwise?"

"Most internal systems..." Whips trailed off, took another breath, continued in what was a clearly weaker voice. ". . . most of them are okay. Life support, power, base controls, even the comm if it had antennas. Haven't tried the jets yet."

Laura had managed to link to the telemetry from Francisco's omni, and through that she could connect to the other two.

She heard herself gasp. "Shit."

"Mother?" The shocked, half-accusatory cries came from all four of her children—five, actually, since she heard Whips echo it.

"Sorry," she said. "But. . . Harratrer, you are in worse shape than I thought. What happened?"

A brief explanation clarified it. "No wonder. You look as though you were in two or three wrecks all at once."

"Can you help him, Doctor?" Campbell asked, on a private channel.

"I'll do what I can, but there's things nanos can't do without outside support. Like moving and resetting bone or, in this case, broken plates. They're not good with draining fluid fast, either."

"How bad is it, Laura?" Akira asked, linking in with his own channel.

She connected the two channels and added in Xander, since he was explicitly in command of Emerald Maui by the Sergeant's choice, and Pearce Haley. "Very," she said quietly. "His oxygen-exchanging manifold got crushed internally; it's functioning at an acceptable level in air because the major damage is after the air-water bypass. But if Whips went into the water and tried to breathe, he'd be running salt water over an open wound and probably be close to drowning."

She continued, trying to sound dispassionate, clinical. "The impact also badly damaged his Sutter Organ—that's something like a combination of our liver and kidneys—broke multiple internal plates, ripped tendons and ligaments and muscles in multiple places, damaged one of his eyes maybe beyond repair, and he's bleeding internally in at least three other places. He needs surgery, not just nanorepair, and he needs it soon. His digestive system's mostly—but only mostly—intact, so he's getting nutrients into the system, but at the rate he's bleeding, even with the nanos trying to shut it down. . ." Her voice was still calm, but she felt two tears splash down on her arms, which she'd folded across her chest in tension.

"Damnation. How long?"

"If he doesn't get treatment? A day. Two days, at the most."

"Xander, can we run Emerald Maui back here by wire?"

There was a pause as the younger man looked over the data they had. When he answered, his voice was grim. "Not a chance. Without external antennas we can't link directly into the shuttle systems, and the drive systems won't engage with the airlock open—at least not without someone overriding a lot of the safety protocols, and I think the interlocks require that someone to be on-site, not remote."

Laura understood what that meant; they couldn't use the omnis to relay remote-control instructions to Emerald Maui—at least not without some very clever programming to get around safety features that normally prevented people from doing very stupid things with the shuttles.

"Not that it would matter anyway," Xander went on. "The exterior cameras are completely gone. The antennas also provided the satellite navigation link, so Emerald Maui doesn't have that. Internal camera feeds show that even the front port is almost impossible to see through."

"That's something we can work around," Campbell said. "We've got satellite feeds, they've got omnis, so do we. Between all that we could navigate Emerald Maui pretty well, good enough that we could get her back here and board her. The problem's those damned interlocks. How long for us, together, to hack a way around them and let us run her with that door open?"

"I really hate that idea, Sergeant Campbell, because I can just see a big wave—or nasty animal—coming through that airlock. But. . ." He thought, then she heard him talking quietly to Tavana, Sakura, and Melody for several minutes. Finally he came back onto the private channel. "Days, probably. At least two or three days, maybe a week."

"At least? No way to speed it up?"

"I'm assuming your codes speed it up already, Sergeant," Xander said. "You're talking about disabling some pretty solidly-written safety precautions and not screwing up all the other associated systems. That's not simple work. We can't afford to mess up here; we could brick whole sections of Emerald Maui's systems if we mess up."

Laura was silent for a moment. Days. Whips does not have days. If I was there I could help, give him more time. . .

"Doctor Kimei," Pearce Haley said, "could you suspend him? The way Samuel did for me?"

Laura closed her eyes and whispered a prayer. "Maybe. Yes, maybe I could. I was looking into that off and on since you arrived. Xander, can you and the others search the archive you have from the medical station, see if you can find my notes on suspension of Bemmius Novus?"

"Right on it!"

She switched back to the public channel. "Whips, Hitomi, Francisco, we're working on ways to help all of you. For safety's sake, I'd like you to go back inside, Francisco, and call us back in. . . in one hour, all right? We've got a little work to do before we figure out how we will get you home. But we will get you home, understand?"

"Yes, Mommy," Hitomi said.

"Understood, Dr. Kimei," Francisco answered.

"Got. . . it," came a weak response from Whips.

In a moment the transmission cut off. "Tavana, Saki, has Xander told you what we need?"

"Yes," Tavana said. "Your archives, we need to find the right material in them. Melody, this is something you can do well."

"Should we start on the safety overrides?" Xander asked.

"Only if that will not in any way affect how long it takes to find the nanosuspension data," Laura said. "Understand, everyone: if we can't find that data and I can't apply it in the next. . . twelve hours," she hesitated, not wanting to say the words. But there was no avoiding the truth. ". . . if we can't, then Harratrer is going to die."

 

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 27 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 26

Meanwhile, on Emerald Maui...

 

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Chapter 26.

The problem, Whips thought, wasn't that he had to send out one of the kids; it was that he had to do that and accept that if something went wrong he could not do anything about it. Sky and Earth knew that there were dangers to going out on a rocking ocean vessel—especially in this ocean. After the tsunami there would almost have to be a huge number of dead bodies, animals that hadn't been able to escape in time, and that meant that the water for many kilometers around, maybe hundreds of kilometers, would be filled with more predators and scavengers looking for an easy meal. Maybe even an island-eater, checking to see if the damage was enough to make the area hit worth tasting.

He looked over at Hitomi, who was carefully laying out a meal on the floor for him, and two more—one for her and one for Franky—on the seats. Francisco was working with his omni, but as Whips watched he shook his head. "I cannot get a connection, Whips! No satellite, no one answers!"

Bite the bullet, as the Sergeant would say. "No, Francisco, I can't get one either. I'm pretty sure that the exterior antennas—which are what let us talk from inside the ship to outside—are gone."

Francisco thought about that for a moment, then noticed the food and came over to help Hitomi finish putting the meals together. "Then we have to go outside. ¿Si?"

"Right," he agreed. "Or rather. . . one of you has to. I can't go out. Honestly, I can barely move. Yes, in the water I could probably move better than I can out of it, but I would be so injured any predator would sense it."

Hitomi and Francisco exchanged glances, and Whips could see Hitomi go pale; Francisco's olive-dark skin didn't show the change so obviously, but he could tell both of them had suddenly realized the truth: it was up to them.

Slowly, Hitomi put down the sandwich and stepped closer to Whips. "Whips. . . Harratrer. . . you're not. . . dying, are you?"

The fear and fright in her voice was so intense that Whips wanted very much to lie, to make her feel better. . . but in these circumstances, he couldn't. "I might be, Hitomi. Even if I'm not. . . I'm not going to be much help for a long time. I might be able to tell you what to do, or how to do it. But actually doing things, that's going to be up to you two."

The tiny golden-haired girl stayed bent over for a moment, and he saw a shiver go through her. But then her back straightened and he saw her jaw tighten; for just an instant, despite all the difference of coloring, he could see that she was a Kimei. "Like Saki when we landed. She wasn't ready. She was scared like me."

"Just like you."

"Like Tavana. And the rest of us. We did not know how, but we had to," Francisco said. "Your parents, the Sergeant, Xander, they are not here." For a moment his expression was touched, not just with fear and uncertainty, but wonder. "We have to be the grown-ups, Hitomi."

She nodded. "'kay. So one of us has to go out."

"That will be me," Francisco said at once.

"Why you? I can go outside just like you!"

Whips almost intervened, but stopped himself. Better to see if they could resolve it reasonably themselves; if they couldn't. . .

"I'm taller," Francisco said. That fact was inarguable, as he'd grown three centimeters in the year since the accident, which made him thirty centimeters taller than Hitomi—despite Hitomi having grown twice as much in the same time. "If I have to jump or climb on things, I can reach things better."

"I can swim better than you," Hitomi said. That, also, was inarguable; Francisco could now manage something better than a dog paddle but not much, while Hitomi could swim about as well as any human her age could ever expect to manage.

Instead of immediately arguing, Francisco looked thoughtful. "Hm. But the idea is just go out and try to make sure our omnis talk, right?"

"Right, but what if we fall off?"

"That would be bad, and yes, swimming would be important. But if you are not tall, maybe you could not reach the right part of Emerald Maui to climb back up and you would be stuck in the water."

Hitomi blinked, clearly not having thought about that. And Franky was right, Whips thought. Climbing back on Emerald Maui from the water would not be easy even for the taller boy; he wasn't sure that Hitomi could do it at all.

"Well. . . a rope! Then you can't fall!"

"But if I can't fall, it doesn't matter who swims better!"

Hitomi opened her mouth, looked offended, then stomped her foot. Then she laughed. "Okay, you go out. If we can find a rope. If we can't, I go out."

"It is a deal!"

Whips grinned—a rippling color pattern that probably wasn't visible to the two kids. Smart. Of course, they've been living with everyone in survival mode for all this time; they've seen a lot of these kind of arguments. They've learned to stop and think. Even through the aches and dizziness that was trying to assail him, that was a warming thought. They can work together. Without me pinging in their direction every ten seconds.

It didn't take too long for Hitomi to locate a rope in the rear storage area. The two of them tied off the rope to the base of one of the crash seats, then Hitomi looped it back and around one of the armrests before giving the end to Francisco.

"Why did you do that?"

"Saki showed me that this gives me leverage," Hitomi answered, pronouncing the last word very carefully. "Means I can pull harder."

"Oh. Yes, I see that." Francisco wrapped the rope around his waist, tied it off, then had Whips check the knot. Then, without being told, he took one of his belt loops, opened the clip, and then clipped it onto the rope.

"Very good, Francisco. Never trust one way of fastening a lifeline," Whips said, forcing his voice to sound as normal as possible; it hurt to talk. "Now, if it starts to come loose, which way will the rope be going?"

Francisco studied the rope, and then pointed.

"Right. So put another knot in the rope before the belt loop clip, so that the rope can't go through it if the main knot comes undone."

Francisco frowned. "But that means I have to untie it now!"

"Yes. But it will be much safer that way. Otherwise the belt loop won't do much to hold it."

After a momentary hesitation, Francisco nodded and, with difficulty, unknotted the rope, tied a simple stop-knot into the rope near the belt-loop, and then re-tied the rope together. "Is this good?"

"Perfect! Now, let's test how hard Hitomi can pull."

With the leverage, braced feet, and a look of grim determination, Hitomi showed she could drag Francisco backward all by herself.

Whips gave a sigh of relief. "All right. Good. Time to go out. Francisco, before you go, listen to me. The outrigger is below the airlock on that side, but with luck you shouldn't have to get on it. The farther out you go on the outrigger, the more things will move and the harder it will be to walk, so try to just go out on the ladder and make the call." His last sentence trailed off in a sort of hiss.

"Whips, are you all right?" Hitomi asked.

"No. But I'm not feeling much worse yet. Let's get this done." He looked back at Francisco. "Franky—Francisco—look out carefully before you actually step out of the airlock."

Francisco suddenly looked less eager. "Oh. Si. The raylamps."

"Or other things." The boy's grim expression reminded Whips that he'd seen Xander almost dragged down and torn apart by the creatures, so his associations with the black stingray-shaped things were about as bad as Whips' memories of them.

Francisco went back into the storage area and came back with a long bush knife, almost a miniature machete. "If one comes at me when the door opens, I will be ready."

All that said, Whips thought there wasn't too much chance of danger in this case.

He was wrong.

Francisco was only starting to lean forward to look out the lock when he jerked back; a black tendril had whipped around the doorframe, and with a wet plop a meter-wide raylamp flopped onto the floor of the airlock.

The little boy didn't hesitate; instantly his long knife plunged into the thing and ripped back, tearing most of the creature in half. It gave a thin whine, but Francisco danced back out of the way of its thrashing tentacles and then kicked it hard, shoving the slick creature's body out the door. With quieter, damp sliding sounds, two other raylamps dropped from the top hull of Emerald Maui and began to feed on their fallen comrade, which was still struggling.

Whips was speechless; he had not expected that. By her expression, neither had Hitomi—and Francisco had now clearly risen in her estimation. "Well. . . well done, Francisco. Is everything clear now?"

Francisco's hand was shaking with obvious adrenalin reaction, but his voice was almost steady. "It looks so. Si, it is, nothing else on the hull I can see." He looked around, at areas none of them could see from inside. "Nothing anywhere near me now, except in the water. Which I am not going into."

"No, not time for a swim."

Francisco nodded, then raised his omni to his mouth. "Sergeant? Xander? This is Francisco, on Emerald Maui!"

 

 

 

 

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 26 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 25

The castaways were recovering from a tsunami...

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Chapter 25.

Sergeant Campbell surveyed the forest from ground level and found himself shaking his head. Doesn't stink too bad yet, but it will, and that'll be just the beginning.

If their columns had been located on the northern edge of the continent, it might have been better in some ways; the wave wouldn't have had a chance to pick up much debris, it would have been more water than anything else. But they'd been kilometers inland and south, and what had reached them had been a set of massive waves of mud and wreckage. Mud, filled with broken rock and torn branches and dead creatures that had failed to flee in time, was many centimeters deep, in some places maybe a meter deep. Undergrowth had been completely stripped away or crushed.

At least getting the Kimeis out of their possibly-dangerous home had been easy; plenty of rope had been stored in an upper room of Campbell's column, so it had just been a matter of throwing it up, getting it braced in the largest window, and letting everyone slide down carefully.

He turned back to contemplating Sherwood Tower, and saw Xander coming back from his inspection. The expression on Xander's face told him what he didn't want to hear. "No good, huh?"

Xander screwed up his face. "I. . . don't know. The real damage is near the entrance, where the water came in, ruined the floor, and then started pouring through. Stuff would get jammed in the opening and then broken by the force of the water running behind it, and that kept stressing and wearing at the column. . ."

"Will the column repair itself? I know there's some parts of the island that do that, right?"

"Dr. Kimei—Akira, I mean—isn't sure. There are living cells in parts of the column, but we've seen these islands weaken and try to cut out dead parts before, so if the columns do that. . ."

He remembered their island practically drawing a dotted line labeled tear here around where they'd settled and imagined the equivalent on the Kimei's column. "Damnation. Then they do have to move out."

"I think so. We made ours pretty roomy, so they can probably squish into a few rooms for a while."

"A while, yeah, but we've got to get things working again fast. What about equipment and supplies? What'd we lose? Everyone?

Tavana's voice replied. "Sakura and I, we have finished the hike to the shore along the line we guessed. There are small pieces of the shelter but nothing worth keeping. The excavator. . . we cannot find a trace of it except a few drag marks we think it made, but even that we cannot be sure."

"So it's down and out in the sea. Never getting that one back," Campbell said. "Anything at all we can recover?"

"Nothing," Sakura answered. Her voice sounded numb, a tone of shock the sergeant remembered hearing on other disaster-struck worlds. "Nothing that was below about three, four meters. You saw what happened inside your column too. The shelter and everything in it. . . gone." She went on in a whisper he didn't think they were meant to hear: "It was all so beautiful and alive and now . . ."

"It will be again, Saki," Laura Kimei said. Her voice held less shock and more determination. "In fact, it is, not that far from us. Compared to the size of this continent, that impact wasn't all that big. Our real problem was that we were very near the point of impact and we're on the very narrow end of the continent. The modest ridge of mountains to the west of us broke the wave's impact on everything past that; there's only minor damage beyond the mountains."

"Well, that's encouraging," Campbell said. "Means that if we have to we can mount expeditions to go there to get supplies. Or move there, if there's no other choice."

"There are a lot of downed trees," Pearce said. "If we have to move, we could probably build rafts to transport everything a lot easier than walking."

"Good thinking." Campbell took a breath and asked the question he'd been dreading. "Dr. Kimei, what about the medical equipment? Your nanoprogramming station and such? Last I knew it was in the shelter."

She was silent for a moment. Then she sighed. "Yes, the station's gone. And I don't think there was a spare in the cargo."

He closed his eyes, gave a quiet curse.

"But," Laura went on, "Xander and Tavana had managed a backup download of the station's programming, and the nanopacks I'd already produced and programmed were either in the upper storage area of Sherwood Tower or were on board Emerald Maui. If we can find –"

"Got them!" came a shout from Melody.

"What? Who? You mean Hitomi, Whips, and Franky?" demanded Sakura.

"I mean I've found Emerald Maui," Melody said. "It didn't sink! It's in what looks like mostly one piece, anyway."

A connection ping later, everyone's omni displayed a satellite image. Magnified to the limit of the SC-178's admittedly inexpensive and small telescopic capabilities, in the very center of the image was a tiny shape, a blunt streamlined shuttle-shape with a long outrigger sticking out from one side.

"Where are they, Mel?"

The image zoomed out, showed a blinking red dot where Emerald Maui was. The dot drifted to one side of the display as the scale increased, and then the edge of their own continent came into sight. "They're about a hundred twenty-seven kilometers from us, almost due south right now."

"If they're alive, why haven't we heard from them?" Laura asked tensely. She paused, then asked quietly, "Do we have any evidence they are alive?"

Campbell frowned. Emerald Maui didn't seem to be damaged enough to make it likely its passengers were dead, but things that would kill humans—or Bemmies—didn't have to hit hard enough to break the hull of a landing shuttle. "I . . . don't know, Ma'am. I wish I did."

"Wait, Sergeant," Tavana's voice said. "Until the wave hit, we had telemetry from the ship, yes?"

"Yes. But we're not getting anything now, is that it? What would that mean?"

"Well, that is a different point than I was going to make, but yes, there is something in that as well. But what I meant was, I am reviewing the data, and I see that Whips triggered the outrigger morph and tail morph to retract."

Xander grinned. "Ha! And since we can see they're extended now, at least one person—probably Whips, since he was hooked up to the ship with authorization—had to be alive after everything was over, to extend them again."

"Yes, that is what I think."

Campbell felt a tiny trickle of hope, and heard a deep, shaking breath being taken by Laura. "Then why aren't they answering?"

"That's what's got me worried," Akira said. "Someone was alive enough and conscious enough to extend the outrigger; why in the world wouldn't they make contact?"

"They would," Maddox said promptly. "So they can't, somehow. Sergeant, you've been in ships like that a lot of times before, what could make you unable to talk to people outside?"

"Huh. Lemme think. Honestly, the only times I remember we couldn't do it was when someone couldn't talk, or where for some reason there wasn't power to the comm unit." He rubbed his chin, thinking. "But if they got the outrigger extended, there's power. Can't imagine the main ship comm's wrecked—how you could have that happen without killing everyone inside I just can't figure, at least not when we're talking about a tsunami and not a freak accident like what happened to Outward Initiative." He thought back over his career. "I remember a few times when we couldn't call out, but that was when we were underground, usually inside some building without molded multiresonance antennas. But that doesn't apply to Emerald Maui."

After a pause, Sakura—her voice slightly more engaged, less dead-sounding—spoke. "Maybe it does apply. The antennas have to be on the outside of the ship, right? Wouldn't that mud-wave and all the bashing around strip the antennas?"

Campbell blinked, then grinned. "By God, you might have it, Saki. Xander, could you do a model with Tav's help? Could a wave like that damage the exterior antenna integrated array?"

Xander was smiling, shaking his head. "Count on Saki to see the obvious. No, I don't need to model it, Sergeant. The conditions it went through, I'd bet on it. That's the answer. They're almost certainly alive, but they can't talk to us."

"Great!" Laura said, and Campbell could hear the relief in her voice.

"Not so fast," Caroline said. "I'd really like to believe that. But. . . if that's the case, all Whips has to do is get outside and his omni will be able to connect. Why hasn't he done that?"

Campbell's feeling of relief faded, and he saw Xander's smile dwindling. Because that was the question, wasn't it? There was no way that Whips wouldn't want to contact them as soon as possible.

So why hadn't he?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 25 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 24

The littlest castaways were in some trouble...

 

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Chapter 24.

Harratrer was rising through a nightmare. The Europan sea surrounded him, filled with darkness and menace. There were no Vents in range, and with horror Harratrer realized he was alone. He was in the high waters, nearer the Sky than the Earth, away from all safety.

And there was something coming, behind him even as he fled. Something huge and swift and hungry.

An orekath.

He jetted as hard as he could, but the water seemed to have turned to gel thicker than a stickyseal. He moved forward centimeters at a time, forcing his trembling body to drive forward, but instead of a dozen meters he covered perhaps one, and the hunting bellow of the creature was upon him.

A tentacle shot out from the darkness and caught at him, two of them, gripping him hard. Harratrer wriggled desperately, felt the crushing grip sliding down his body in a wave of stretched and bruised ligaments and shift-plates, but he was moving forward, he might just –

And then a second set of tentacles caught him just as he escaped the first. Once more he drove forward, almost escaping, but again he was caught, the orekath's mighty grip squeezing him, releasing, then constricting again. . .

He gasped suddenly and gave a hooting cough that echoed through the cabin, a cough driven by something pushing with emphatic broad force on his back, then withdrawing.

"Whips!" Hitomi nearly screamed. "Stop, Franky, stop, he's waking up!"

I'm. . . I'm on Emerald Maui, not in the ocean, Whips realized fuzzily. Agony rippled through his body. "What. . . happened?" he managed to force out.

"Oh God, oh GodOhGodOhGodOhGod I thought you were dead and we didn't know what to do and everything was rolling and then it stopped but no one answers and then I remembered the treatment Mom told us about once but neither of us was strong enough to do the compression because you're so big and –"

"Hitomi!" The sharp bellow turned into a gasp as pain lanced through him at even the simple motions of speaking loudly. "Hitomi," he said again, this time as quietly as he could, "Slowly. The wave hit us, I remember. But I . . ." the terrifying moments came back to him. ". . . but I hadn't finished strapping in and I started slipping out as we rolled and banged against things, and then. . ."

Francisco nodded, coming into Whips' view, his usually chocolate-olive complexion slightly grayer with worry. The light itself seemed somewhat washed out, misty, as though the ship was caught in a fog. "Then you did come loose and you tumbled around the inside of the ship," he said. "You missed hitting us by centimeters. More than once."

"You weren't breathing when we got to you," Hitomi said tremulously. She swallowed and went on, "and we tried calling Mommy and Sergeant Campbell but no one answered and we both almost panicked but I remembered what Mommy and Saki said about panicking so we tried to think. And I remembered Mom and Dad showed us what first aid for a Bemmie was, including Bemmie CPR. So we tried to compress your body the right way –"

"Si, but we were not strong enough," Francisco said. "Then Hitomi thought that maybe we could do it with the adjustable seats."

"Seats?" Whips managed to reach back with his top arm and feel the reclined back of the seats above him. "Oh. Oh, that was clever, Hitomi. You dragged me over behind one of the rows of seats and reclined and raised them in a wave."

"Franky got the rhythm," Hitomi said. "He called out one, two, three, and we would hit the raise and lower controls like he said."

Probably overcompressed and torqued plates all out of place—the rear contours of those seats aren't anything like the right shape.

     But it did work. "Good work," he managed to say. "But all that tumbling did hurt me."

He turned his attention to his interior nanos, and even though it hurt he sucked in a breath. Screaming Vents, I'm in bad shape. His lower left arm was broken in three places—the shift-plates not merely dislocated or torn from their muscle-ligament joins but cracked across. His top arm was mostly-functional. The lower right arm didn't have any actual breaks but a lot of dislocations.

But the rest of him. . . he shuddered and had his nanos trigger a surge of both emergenine—his people's equivalent of adrenalin—and pain suppression before he dared look again. His mind cleared temporarily, but that didn't make things look any better.

His right bottom eye didn't respond at all. If it was still there and working, the exterior cover shutter was too badly damaged to work, and while he wasn't in any way a doctor, if he read the nanosignals right the eye itself was damaged. His beak and masticators had been struck a few heavy blows; they'd probably work but it would be really, really painful. His main body structure. . . was hurt. Hurt bad. Some of the damage was new—the improvised CPR had done damage, some of it significant. No point in telling the kids that, of course. But he was bleeding internally in at least three places. Several organs were damaged, though he thought the nanos were getting that under control.

But overall. . . I. . . I don't know if I'm going to survive this.

Whips saw Hitomi and Francisco looking at him with terrified, tense faces, and knew that that didn't matter. As long as he was alive and conscious, he had a job to do.

"Okay. . . kids," he said. "First. . . good work getting me awake. I'm getting my nanos on this. Hitomi, there were nanopacks stored onboard. I know your mom tailored at least a few of them for me. Do you know where they would be?"

"Ummm. . ." Hitomi closed her eyes and visibly calmed herself. Whips crossed two of his functional fingers in the gesture Sakura had taught him long ago; if Hitomi could focus enough to get into the right mindset, she'd be able to recall the exact location of everything she'd seen packed on the ship. That was one of her talents, even if the obsessive focus had previously gotten her in trouble.

The little girl's face lit up, the blue eyes snapped open. "Duh! They're back in storage, port side, rack seven, shelf three!"

"Rack seven, shelf three," Francisco repeated and dashed unsteadily back.

Unsteadily? Oh. Now that he thought about it, he could feel Emerald Maui rocking back and forth in a significant swell. Whips triggered a connection to the ship, was relieved to sense its immediate response. Main operating systems still working, at least. He sent the reconfiguration codes, and those, too, seemed to be working; he felt Emerald Maui's motions flatten out noticeably as the rear rudder-vanes and the outrigger extended themselves to operating dimensions. That will make it easier for the kids, anyway. And reduce the amount of motion my body has to put up with.

Francisco came back with a nanopack. "What do I do with it?"

"Let me look at it first." Sure enough, there were the markings on the green-blue gel pack that showed that Laura had tweaked the performance of this healing pack for Bemmie biology. "Take about half of it and smear it on my face, including near my eyes. Then I guess I'll have to swallow the rest." He didn't look forward to that; nanogel had a particularly nasty texture for swallowing and the taste was not anything he'd recommend, either. But if even half the nanos could get on the job, he'd have a better chance of living.

The two children carefully applied half the gelpack to his face area, then Hitomi squeezed the repulsive ooze into his mouth. Somehow Whips kept his throat from sealing itself shut and forced the vile sludge down. Ideally it would be injected into him, but the pack wasn't injector-equipped and he wasn't up to instructing either of them on locating, identifying, and applying Bemmie injector assemblies.

That's about all we can do right now. I'll have to wait and see if I need more packs. . . or if the packs can't do the job. Without a doctor or at least trained medical nanotechnician to direct the nanos they had to rely on general programming, which might not be ideal for this situation. So much damage in so many areas. . . maybe he should do another pack right away. But there were only so many of the packs available at all.

He gave the rippling Bemmie equivalent of a shrug, and winced as that reminded him of just how widespread the injuries were. He'd rolled around and around in the cabin, bouncing off almost every hard surface. It had been a minor miracle that he hadn't landed on Hitomi or Francisco.

"Okay. First thing. . . we're stable, we're not sinking, I can get a response from Emerald Maui, so we're not in immediate danger. Air processors are working fine, reactor's online. So next thing is getting contact with the others."

The fact that the children hadn't been able to make contact didn't mean much. Inside the ship, the omnis depended on being able to make a good relay connection with Emerald Maui and her inlaid antenna arrays, and there were plenty of reasons that might not happen in an emergency. Whips engaged the shuttle's main transmitters. "Sherwood Tower, Sherwood Tower, this is Emerald Maui, come in."

There was no response, and Whips noticed there were a couple of yellows and reds showing on the comm board. "I couldn't get Mommy or the Sergeant on the line. Neither could Francisco," Hitomi said.

No connectivity with the array? How in the depths did that happen? The array's molded into the hull, multiple wavelength support inherent to the design, just tune and transmit. I'm not seeing any damage in the actual structure of the ship, and the actual connection cable's also molded in, so. . .

Whips froze, and the tension sent sparks of pain dancing along his body. Oh, I have a bad feeling about this. He saw the misty-fog light illuminating the cabin, a light that came from the forward port—the internal lights dim or off because they weren't needed.

With an agonizing effort, Whips pulled himself forward a meter or so, giving him a chance to look directly forward.

For an instant, he thought they were in a fog, for there were only faint shadows visible in the port, most of it a pearlescent, almost featureless white. But then he was able to make out a dim but visible pattern within the white, a pattern of an innumerable set of lines and streaks large and small that covered the entire port—a port whose exterior had a hardness equal to diamond.

"Oh, Vents," he sighed.

The tsunami. It had picked them up on the north side of the continent, then dragged and tumbled them across kilometers of the semi-landmass, in what had become not water but churning mud filled with fragments of natural carbonan fibers and spikes that were the key reinforcement and strength of the floating continents.

Emerald Maui had been literally tumbled through a gargantuan grinding and polishing cycle driven by the power of a small asteroid impact. The diamond-hard dust and mud had scoured the exterior of the shuttle to the point that its reinforced viewports were almost opaque. . . and had scraped and gouged at the rest of the hull until, undoubtedly, the antenna array had been ripped off or ground down to the base hull, completely eliminating it as a functional connection to the world.

There was no way to communicate from inside the hull. And Whips knew that he was in no shape to leave.

Which meant that he was going to have to send one of the kids outside.

 

 

 

 

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 24 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 23

There had been an ominous silence on the airwaves...

------

 

 

Chapter 23.

Hitomi gripped the arms of her seat tight, focusing on the panels in front of her. She had to concentrate, because if she didn't she'd skip from thought to thought to thought in a blur, and it would be scary. Way too scary.

Whips was still out there, and the wave, the wave was coming, a big wave they said. No, wait—she heard the dragging sound of the big Bemmie moving fast behind her.

"Are you both strapped in?" he said, his voice having that hooting undertone it got when he was breathing hard.

"Yes!" Hitomi answered, feeling relieved that big brother Whips was onboard. She heard Francisco also answer, from his acceleration seat nearby.

"Good," Whips said absently. She heard him fumbling with the straps, and for a moment she could see the straps in her mind, remember the exact position of every strap and fastener, and she swallowed hard. Those aren't right for a Bemmie.

She heard a rippling rumble that she knew was a Bemmie bad word, and the whispering of the straps and the muffled jingle of fastenings intensified. She tried to turn her head to look, but the seat wouldn't let her. Of course not, she thought, remembering the diagrams in the emergency courses, arrows and vectors showing how sitting the wrong way in the seat could hurt you bad.

"Get ready, Francisco, Hitomi!"

Hitomi heard it now, a faint whisper like a stream . . . but a stream that from the sound was passing under them. She couldn't see it, not from where they sat, but the water was coming. But this didn't sound so bad. . .

The light from the port dimmed, and her gaze snapped up to look.

Her first thoughts were that it was beautiful; it was a massive green wall, streaked with foam moving in almost-patterns across it. The focused part of her started trying to count the lines of foam and see if they came in patterns.

But then Francisco screamed, and suddenly Hitomi felt as though something had switched on in her, and her focus was gone; she could see it coming, a monstrous wave that was blotting out the sky, and a spurt of cold-spiky terror ripped through her, stealing her breath; she couldn't make a sound.

Lines creaked behind her, the sound of Whips' arms entwining themselves tightly around them. "Hold on!"

The wave began to curl, and Hitomi's terrified memory replayed another book, a chart of a wave, hitting shallows, oh, yes, the skirt-shelf that sticks out from the island, and at the same time all she could do was gasp in and then hold her breath, redoubling her hold as the whole world turned green-white-black –

A gigantic hand slammed into Emerald Maui, skidding the lifeboat sideways with a grating, ripping screech, but still, that wasn't so bad, if the hull held out everything would be fine –

And then Emerald Maui tipped and began to spin, tumbling over and over, smashing randomly into things now caught up in a murky blackness that enveloped them. Hitomi did scream now, feeling the pain of the high-pitched sound in her throat but hearing none of it over the roaring, grinding, grating thunder that beat on the ship's hull from every direction.

Something flew over her head and hit the wall with a thud that was, barely, audible in the din, and then it flew past again, striking with a deep, pained whoop.

It's Whips! He's. . . he didn't get strapped down enough! She cringed as far down into her seat as she could, trying not to think about what would happen if Whips fell on her.

The tumbling and crashing went on, spinning them around and around, and Hitomi was getting dizzy, her stomach starting to protest as the ship not only rolled but whirled around, nose to tail again and again and then flipping end over end before going back to rolling, and all the time hitting things, grinding-growling battering, and poor Whips tumbling around like a pebble in a can.

Then, without warning, the tumbling slowed, steadied. The ship was still careening and bounding along, but she rolled once more, righting herself, Emerald Maui finding her natural pose. She was rolling and rocking in what had to be waves, but smaller waves, waves under her. Light began to return, the splash and ripple of waves clearing the blackness from the front port.

But. . .

But there was nothing out there. With a creeping horror Hitomi stared at the port. Instead of waves or the waving trees of the island, or even wreckage, there was nothing, just a . . . a milky whiteness. For a moment she wondered if it was a cloud, fog, thick fog, but the day had been clear. And this didn't have the look of fog. It was somehow swirled yet unmoving, her eyes just able to sense some kind of texture to it, but it was a texture that looked like. . . like. . .

"The port," Francisco said, and his voice seemed loud in the ringing silence. "It has been clouded. Like the glass on the shower doors at my old house."

Hitomi gave a huge sigh of relief. Now that Francisco had said it, it was obvious. The front window of Emerald Maui had somehow become the color of milk. Light sort of came through, but not images.

And hearing Francisco talk made her feel better too. They'd come through that disaster. "Whips? Are you okay?"

Silence.

She remembered the thudding tumble and swallowed, then unstrapped herself. "Whips!"

The Bemmie was sprawled against the back wall, arms splayed and crumpled under him. She could see that he was badly hurt, there were lumps and twisted parts that just didn't look right, and. . .

"Hitomi. . . he is not breathing," Francisco whispered.

"Oh no. . . Mom. MOM!" she shouted. "Mom, Whips is hurt, he's not breathing, what do I do, Mommy?"

There was no answer. Hitomi heard herself starting to breathe faster, panic creeping up behind her like a monster, as she realized that her connection was dead. Her omni showed the red slash symbol that meant no connectivity to the main net. And a red slash through all her family's icons. Only Francisco's and Whips' were still green and ready.

"They can't hear us," she whispered, and heard her voice squeak as she did. "Whips isn't breathing and they can't hear us!"

"Dios mio," Francisco said. "Then. . . then we're alone."

That thought, and the terror in Francisco's voice, was almost enough to bring the monster panic down on her. Alone, with Whips dead or dying, no way to talk to anyone. . .

But then she remembered all the other scary days, and Mom and Sakura and Dad saying that the most important thing was not to panic. . . and most of all she remembered her sister Sakura on one of those days—sitting herself in the pilot's chair and trying to land LS-5 by herself. She remembered every detail of that moment, just like she could remember almost everything, and she saw her sister's face, turned to look to the side, so pale it was almost white, and it finally really dawned on Hitomi how scared Sakura had been.

So scared.

But she had done it. She had taken LS-5 from the depths of space all the way to the surface, flown them through a storm, and landed them. Crashed. . . but they'd lived. Because Sakura hadn't let being scared stop her.

Hitomi closed her eyes. Focus. Focus on something. Think. Think. Think. What do we do?

It was hard. It was so, so very hard to focus, her mind wanted to run in all directions at once. But that was why she needed to focus, why she did focus so much when she could, because if she didn't find something to concentrate on, her mind skipped all around from one thing to another. It didn't bother her but it confused everyone else. And it did make some things difficult—stop that. Concentrate. Whips, we need to focus on Whips.

She swallowed again, then moved to Whips' side.

Not breathing. Francisco's right. A flash of a medical manual, saying two minutes without breathing or heartbeat would result in brain damage. . .

No, wait. That's humans. Wasn't there something about Bemmies? Mom. . .

And suddenly she had it, a talk that Mom had given them on first aid, on emergencies. . .

". . . now for one of us two minutes without breathing or heartbeat is very bad," her mother said. "But with Bemmies it's different. If they're not breathing on land that is a bad sign, but it's not quite that desperate. Bemmies are mostly aquatic creatures, and they store up extra oxygen in what we call Klugman's Organ—sort of a specialized liver-type organ which is solely for binding oxygen in a highly concentrated manner that can be released back into the bloodstream."

Hitomi had never felt so thankful for her peculiar memory as she did then. She shushed Francisco as he started to say something, and listened hard to her mother. "So you have at least half an hour, and maybe as much as an hour and a half, before you need to worry about oxygen. Even if the heart stops, the brain and other organs have protections against low oxygen conditions. Ten minutes without heartbeat is about the limit, though."

"But Mom," Caroline said, "You can't give a Bemmie CPR, right?"

"Not the way you do to humans, no," Mom said. "But there is a way. . ."

Hitomi straightened up. "There's a way to help Whips!" She looked around desperately. "If we can just figure out how. . ."

Francisco looked at her, then nodded. "You tell me what we need to do. We'll figure out how." He nodded again. "We will."

 

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 23 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.

Castaway Resolution: Chapter 22

When last we left our castaways, they had a problem...

-----

 

 

Chapter 22.

Even without Whips' terrifying message, Laura would have known that something was horribly wrong. With no visible warning, the quadbirds and other flying creatures suddenly burst from their perches and flew, whistling and hooting and screeching, away, all in a mingled, multicolored mass that arrowed off to the south.

Almost in the same moment, she could see movement on the ground and the trees—animals large and small running, scuttling, swinging through the branches, and all going in the same direction. A herd of capys hurried straight through the center of the clearing. As Akira came up next to her, she saw a tree kraken bound through the area from tree-trunk to tree-trunk. She released her grip on the sill, realizing her hands ached from the tension. "The other girls –"

"All safe." She heard the rapping of feet coming up the stairs; at the same time she heard the rapid dialogue between Whips and his crewmates.

Then she couldn't believe what she was hearing. That crazy boy is trying to save the engine when a tsunami is coming!

It took both her and Campbell to get Whips to accept that there was no sense in this quixotic attempt and concentrate on getting himself inside and strapped down.

Sakura was next to her now, and her face was white under the dark tan. "Whips. . ." she whispered.

"He'll be okay, honey," she said, trying to convince herself. "Those shuttles are tough and he knows enough to strap in well."

"Emerald Maui isn't configured for a Bemmie passenger," Akira said quietly. "I hope Harratrer had time to –"

"Hold on!" came Whips' voice—and then a rumbling roar that cut off.

Sakura didn't scream, but her grip on Laura's arm was tight as a tourniquet.

Then Laura heard a noise—a hissing that became a rattling, rushing sound, and a deep rumbling underneath.

A brown-gray carpet burst into view, enveloping, tearing and crushing the undergrowth and grinding it down, sweeping the remains up into the tide of destruction that was already more running mud and debris than water. Laura heard screams of disbelief, some of them her own, as the tsunami surged across the clearing below. The temporary shelter that had been their town square, their meeting place and theater, was torn from the ground, its solidly-anchored pegs no more able to resist that savage torrent than they could a bulldozer. Over the public channel she could hear Tavana's disbelieving curses in three languages; Xander was murmuring "no, no, no" over and over, and she could hear Pearce praying.

The tsunami flood reached Sherwood Column, and Laura gripped the sill harder as she felt it, felt the vibrating impact of water, mud, and debris being dragged and ground against the base of their home. "My God, Akira, will the column hold up?"

Akira's face was pale, but he answered, "Of course it will. Remember how hard it was to cut into."

But his eyes met hers, and Laura shivered, seeing the real answer: I don't know.

The water was roaring now, a snarl and a deep basso thunder and a shrieking hiss all combined. The level rose higher, a wave in truth, driving hard against the trees and columns, sending fountains of spray a dozen meters into the air. There was a groaning crack, then another, and now trees were falling, torn from their roots and then dragged down, to collide with other trees or the bases of columns and be stuck, barricading the flow until its implacable force tore the trunk to splinters.

A screeching, grinding sound from below, and with horror Laura saw the ramp-door to the column ripped away, drowned and destroyed in the black-brown flood. "Is everyone upstairs?" she demanded.

"We're all here, Mom," Caroline said, her words shaking like the column.

The sound of rushing water was coming from inside now, the water pouring into the lowest section of their house, the foyer. "If this keeps rising –"

"—then there's nothing we can do," Akira said grimly. "All we can do is –"

There was a sudden shock that transmitted itself through Sherwood Column, and now the water was thundering inside. For a crazy instant Laura harbored the insane conviction that the water was coming up the stairs, charging up for her and her family.

But the water levels weren't nearly that high yet, so what. . .

"The bottom floor—it's gone!" Melody shouted. "We're hearing a waterfall going down through our house into the island!"

"Naturally," Campbell's tense voice said. "Get that many tons of water and who-knows-what on that one floor, it had to give way."

"Ours, it has a solid bottom," Tavana added. "That will not happen here."

A third time the water rose, and more of the trees—wooden and otherwise—leaned and fell with groaning, splintering sounds that blended with the growling thunder of the tsunami. A writhing shape was briefly visible in the horizontal cataract—an immense wormlike thing, twin to the creature that had nearly killed Whips on one of their first nights on Lincoln. But huge as it was, its strength meant nothing to the meteoric flood; it was dragged back under, hammered against stumps, crushed and swept out of sight, farther into the flooded woods.

Sherwood Column thrummed like a bass string being struck by an angry god-child; another of the columns they could see shuddered visibly and then tilted, fell. The girls screamed, even Caroline; Laura only kept herself from doing so by clamping her mouth shut, and she could see the fear in Akira's eyes when she glanced to her husband. None of us will survive if the column falls into the flood. . .

She closed her eyes and held on, hoping that she would not feel the terrible disorienting sensation of the room she stood in tilting. . .

Then Laura became aware that the roaring was diminishing, more a grumble and hiss, and even that fading. She opened her eyes, looked down.

The water had stopped its headlong flight; for a few moments it eddied in seeming confusion, and the sound of their indoor cataract ceased. Then the water began to recede, flowing away, dropping down.

In a few minutes, there were only scattered pools across the devastated floor of the forest.

Laura glanced around, assuring herself that all of her family—minus Hitomi and Whips—were there and save. "Sergeant, are you all okay?"

Campbell's shaken voice replied after a moment. "Except for our boy on Emerald Maui, all present and accounted for. You?"

"Everyone's fine here."

"Then we'd better go check out our columns pronto; you saw that one fall, right?"

Laura understood his point. "All right, everyone grab your go-bags and get outside now. . . wait." Realization struck her. "Sergeant, we may have a problem."

"Dammit, yes," Campbell said. "You might not have a floor to walk out with, just a long drop to nowhere."

"I'll go check it out," Sakura said.

"I will do it," her father said, his voice iron-hard in a way it very rarely was; Laura saw Sakura freeze, then nod.

In a few moments Akira was back. "The whole bottom floor is gone, including storage. The steps end hanging in midair, a long way from the entrance."

"You have any rope?"

"I will check, but most of that was stored on that floor."

"We've got some, so no biggie. You'll have to go out your largest window. Wait a few and we'll be along to help."

"Understood. We'll wait." She raised her voice. "Whips? Hitomi? Francisco? How are you?"

Moments stretched out, and there was no answer.

"Whips? Answer immediately! Hitomi, are you there? Francisco?"

But no matter how many times she, or the others, repeated the words, the airwaves remained silent.

 

 

The post Castaway Resolution: Chapter 22 appeared first on Ryk E. Spoor, Author, Gamer, Geek God.