Eric Flint's Blog, page 210

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 47

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 47

Chapter 7

Dr. Phil’s Amazing Lightning Crystal

November 1631, Jena, Freedom Arches

Tasha Kubiak tried to tune out the pompous ass who was still pontificating. Somehow both Tracy Kubiak and Danielle Kowach, the two other members of the Kubiak Country partnership who could speak competent German, had managed to be needed elsewhere when this trip had come up. It was now two weeks since Dr. Gribbleflotz had commenced deliveries of Gribbleflotz Sal Aer Fixus, also known as baking soda. But there had been no word from the good doctor about when he would commence production of baking powder. Someone had to travel to Jena to find out what the holdup was and do whatever it took to get Dr. Gribbleflotz making baking powder. Tasha had hoped her boss, Sebastian Mora of Mora’s Café, would refuse to give her the time off to travel to Jena. However, as soon as Sebastian had heard she was going to ask about baking powder, he had all but packed her bags for her.

So here she sat, letting the drone issuing from the good doctor pass over her head. Growing restless while she waited for Dr. Gribbleflotz to finish, Tasha tried to relax. It wouldn’t do to aggravate the good doctor by interrupting. In an effort to give her restless hands something to do she reached for her purse. Well drilled hands felt inside for the cigarettes and lighter. Still looking attentively at Dr. Gribbleflotz, Tasha expertly felt for a cigarette. There were only a few left. Did she really need the comfort a precious cigarette would offer? Yes.

It was the action of a moment to remove a cigarette and place it in her mouth. For a brief moment, just the time it took to put the flame to the end of the cigarette and to inhale that first blissful lungful of nicotine laden smoke, she took her eyes off the doctor.

“What is that you have there?”

Tasha looked up. The change in tone and volume had penetrated her best efforts to shut out his drone. She waved her left hand, the one with the smoldering cigarette in it. But Dr. Gribbleflotz’ eyes didn’t follow it. They were locked on her right hand. Looking down she couldn’t see what was holding the good doctor’s attention. It was just an ordinary cigarette lighter.

“It’s a cigarette lighter.” Tasha offered it for inspection. “You pull that jewel down and a spark ignites the gas.”

Dr. Gribbleflotz looked at Tasha. Then, his eyes alight with interest, he carefully examined the lighter. He flicked it several times. Each time a flame issued from the hole on the top. “How does it work?”

Tasha stumbled mentally, trying to remember anything she had ever heard about cigarette lighters. “It uses a flammable gas for fuel. When you pull down the jewel the gas is turned on. At the same time, a spark lights the gas. It says lit as long as you hold the jewel down.” Tasha felt quite proud of herself for remembering all of that. It was almost word for word the explanation her daughter Amy had given when Tasha had asked the same question.

“But what makes the spark?” Dr. Gribbleflotz asked, a little too controlled.

“Oh.” Tasha looked back at the lighter Dr. Gribbleflotz held. This was getting too deep for her. “It’s an electric spark. Pulling down the jewel completes a circuit which creates an electric spark which lights the gas.”

“Electric spark?”

“Yes, like . . .” Tasha struggled for a synonym, something Dr. Gribbleflotz might be familiar with. Her eyes reached out, searching for something. And there it was. A pole towering above a building. A lightning conductor. “Like lightning, only much smaller.”

Eyes wide, brows lifted almost to the back of his balding head Dr. Gribbleflotz looked back at Tasha, hastily dropping the lighter. “Lightning? You carry a lightning maker on your person?”

“No, silly.” Tasha rescued her cigarette lighter, shaking her head gently. “Lightning is much more powerful. The electric sparks in my lighter can only jump a tiny distance.” She held her thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart.

Carefully, Dr. Gribbleflotz reached out again for the lighter. Holding it once again, he tried to light it. “How does it store the lightning?”

“Oh, that type of lighter doesn’t use a battery. It uses some fancy crystal that emits a spark when you pull down the jewel.”

“The ‘fancy crystal’ stores the lightning and releases the spark when you pull the jewel?”

“Something like that. I do know it doesn’t ever need batteries, though. We have one of the same kind of thingies to light the gas range. It must be more than ten years old, and neither I or my husband has ever replaced any batteries.”

Dr. Gribbleflotz looked carefully from the lighter to Tasha. Each time he glanced at the lighter he flicked it on. “Do you know how to make these crystals?”

“Oh, no. They’re way beyond me. My daughter, though. She grew all kinds of crystals when she was at school. Why, if I remember correctly, she even grew some pezzi . . . piezo . . . ah . . . pezeyletric crystals for a science project once.”

Eyes beaming brightly, Dr. Gribbleflotz took a deep breath. He carefully placed the lighter on the table in front of him. Releasing his breath, he looked Tasha in the eyes. “What . . . are . . . pezeyletric crystals?”

“They’re crystals just like the one in the lighter. If you do something to them they throw out an electric spark.”

“Can you obtain a ‘cheat sheet’ to make these pezeyletric crystals, Frau Kubiak?”

“Oh, yes. My daughter, Amy. She made a wonderful display for her science project. It had pictures and even a working model that would spark.”

“How long would it take to get a cheat sheet?”

“Oh, I don’t have to get a cheat sheet. My Amy had all the details on her science project. With pictures and everything.” Tasha looked up at Dr. Gribbleflotz, her eyes brimming with pride. “She got an ‘A’ for it and a certificate as well.”

“Frau Kubiak. What does your daughter’s ‘science project’ have to do with these pezeyletric crystals?”

Confused, Tasha looked at him. Surely it was obvious? “My daughter did a science project on pezeyletric crystals. All I have to do is dig it out of the back shed. I kept all her school projects you know.” Tasha smiled to herself. She knew she had Dr. Gribbleflotz hooked. “I’ll let you borrow my daughter’s science project if you will start making us baking powder. Only as a loan, though. I want it back. Do we have a deal?” Tasha held out her right hand.

With one final look at the cigarette lighter, Dr. Gribbleflotz carefully reached over and dropped it lightly into Tasha’s waiting hand. “Only if I can follow the directions. If I cannot make any of these pezeyletric crystals, then there is no deal.”

Tasha thought about it. If her daughter could make pezeyletric crystals using household items, then surely he could. “It’s a deal.” Tasha stood and collected her coat and handbag. A sudden thought sent her hand into her coat pocket. Pulling out an envelope, she waved it before passing it over to Doctor Gribbleflotz. “There’s a bank draft in there for your share of the profits so far. Oh, and by the way, could you increase production of the baking soda? Please? More and more people in Grantville want to buy our baking soda.”

“Sal Aer Fixus!”

“What?”

“Sal Aer Fixus. Not baking soda. Sal Aer Fixus. Baking soda is not a proper product for a great alchemist. I do not make baking soda. I make Sal Aer Fixus. Gribbleflotz Sal Aer Fixus. Remember that, Frau Kubiak.” With that final utterance Dr. Gribbleflotz exploded to his feet and stomped off.

Tasha shook her head in amused disgust and watched the figure of Dr. Gribbleflotz disappear down the street. It’s a wonder he can stand upright with an ego that size. Tasha turned to leave and was confronted by a waitress holding a tray. There was only a single piece of paper on it. Flicking her eyes to the face of the waitress, Tasha smiled. The good doctor had stiffed her with the bill for lunch. With a rueful grin, Tasha reached in her purse and dropped some money onto the tray. She waved off any change and left. Mission almost accomplished. Now, where did she put that science project?

Sunday, the Fellowship hall, after Mass

Patrolling the fellowship hall with the large teapot, Erin Zaleski came across the widow, Mary Anna Abruzzo. “Mrs. Abruzzo, would you like me to top up your cup?”

Mrs. Mary Anna Abruzzo took another sip of her tea and grimaced as she looked up at Erin. “No thank you, Erin. I have my own special tea.” With a sour look at the contents of her cup, she took another small sip.

“Is there anything wrong with your tea, Mrs. Abruzzo?” Erin gave Mrs. Abruzzo a worried look. She was sitting at a table near a radiator in the fellowship hall and she had fair screwed up her face when she took that last sip.

“No, Erin. There’s nothing wrong with the tea. If you like willow bark tea, that is.”

“If you don’t like it, why are you drinking it?”

“It’s my arthritis, Dear. It helps relieve the pain.”

“Isn’t aspirin supposed to be good for arthritis Mrs. Abruzzo? Surely aspirin would be better than that willow bark tea?”

“Young lady, it’s quite clear you aren’t familiar with the price of things these days. Do you realize what aspirin costs these days? Twenty dollars a tablet, if you can get them. That’s the black-market rate, mind. If the doctors will prescribe them you can get them cheaper, but not much cheaper. And me living on a pittance and dependent on the charity of my children.”

Erin, a little lost for words, backed away, keeping an eye on Mrs. Abruzzo who grimaced over another sip of her tea.

Sunday Lunch, Belle’s Place

“Hey guys, what do you think of the new baking powder?” Belle Drahuta looked around at the rest of the Kubiak Country Industries directors. “Three cheers for Tasha. Hey, Tasha. How did you get the geek to make baking powder?”

 

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 17

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 17

Chapter 17.

Tavana sagged back into the shelter’s narrow bed and let out an explosive sigh. He hurt in places he didn’t remember he had.

The temporary shelter was made of the lightest, strongest materials available. But it was also designed to house up to ten people, which meant that even with the lightest, strongest materials it was very heavy, very bulky, and unfortunately required some manual work to unpack and set up. The automated anchors had failed; they were meant for use on soil surfaces, and after the whole perimeter had been scraped down, there was nothing but stone, or something like it, so Tavana, Maddox, and Xander had been forced to use a hammer – a real, actual hammer, a piece of reinforced composite with a big chunk of heavy metal at the end – to pound the sharp carbonan and steel spikes into the ground.

Fortunately the rock in question was pretty soft, but still, it had taken hours to get everything fastened down to the Sergeant’s satisfaction. “You can’t cut corners with this stuff, kids,” he’d said after forcing them to pull out three spikes, pull the shelter tighter, and start hammering again. “This shelter’s gonna be our home for a while anyway, until we can figure out something better and more permanent, and that means she’s gotta be locked down damn near perfect.”

But it wasn’t all bad. After all that work, letting himself slowly sink into the softness of the bed felt that much wonderfully better.

“Tavana!” came the Sergeant’s voice. “Bringing your stuff inside doesn’t mean stop for a nap! Come on, sunshine, we got work to do!”

“Merde.” He said the French curse quietly, then levered himself upright; his muscles protested this unwise course of action, but he knew he had no choice. “I thought we were done for the day, Sergeant,” he said as he came out.

“Not yet.” Campbell was looking around the wide, clean perimeter. “I’ve got one more job of cleanup I need to do, and you’re going to come with me.”

Tavana opened his mouth to ask “Why me?“, but caught himself at the last moment. Arguing with the Sergeant, that is stupid. After a pause, he figured he could ask the question, just without the whining overtone he knew would have been in it a minute ago. “All right, Sergeant, but why me instead of Xander?”

“I want at least one armed person with any group, which means in practice that at most we’ve got two groups. Xander, Maddox, and Francisco are down at the lake trying their hand at fishing, since there turned out to be line and rods we could combine with the TechTools to make a decent fishing rod. Got them some gloves and gave Xander serious instructions on how I want him to do this, and made damn sure the other kids know that Xander’s in charge. So that leaves me and you to do this little chore.”

He followed the Sergeant across the scraped rock. “What exactly are we looking for?”

Campbell’s sharp dark gaze flicked around the landscape, then he reached out an arm and pointed. “Over there.”

Tavana looked, but he just saw more scraped earth and stone. Even as they got closer, he really didn’t see anything notable. “Sorry, sir, I don’t get it.”

“Hm. Well, maybe you need a little observational training. Don’t you notice anything different a little ways ahead of us?”

Tavana frowned. Campbell wouldn’t be joking about stuff like this, so there had to be something special about the area ahead. But all he saw was the streaky white of the scraped bedrock, interspersed with some dark brown (occasionally with white streaks) that was dirt stuck in a ripple of the landscape, but –

“Wait. That patch looks pretty circular.”

“Now you’re catching on, son. So tell me why.”

He thought a moment. “Hole. There has to be a hole there, a round hole.”

“And a hole, Tavana, could be a burrow. I saw some nasty-looking things wiggling away from the excavator, but there’s no guarantee all of them got away.” He looked back at the shelter. “I made sure there were none of them under the place we set up the shelter, but there’s going to be quite a few out here, I’m afraid. If I had my way and unlimited resources, I’d rather glass this whole area over, but there’s no way for us to do that. Suppose I could try to hover across the whole place with the jets on, but that wouldn’t get far down. Which means we have a less safe job to do.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Operation ‘Poke It With a Stick’,” Campbell said with a wry grin. “I’ve got a nice long piece of thick carbonan rod here from one of the storage areas. You will poke that rod into these round areas when I tell you to, and try to annoy anything that might be under there into coming out. I wish I had a better way, but not with what we have available now.”

Tavana looked doubtfully at the long, white, slender pole. “And if something does come out?”

“I will – in all likelihood – gun it down,” Campbell replied, hefting a pistol with a muzzle that looked like a cannon to Tavana. “Depends on my instinct when I see it. Can’t always say – those decisions are split-second and not always conscious. But I’d bet on shooting first and second-guessing myself later; we can’t take chances.” His gaze dropped to Tavana’s legs, and nodded. “Those coveralls are tough enough to protect you some, and you are wearing the boots we got out of storage, right?”

“Yes, sir. Come almost up to my knees.”

“Good man. Those are Pathfinders, not top of the line, but good solid boots for colonials or military alike.” He looked wistful for a moment. “Wish I had mine; best damn boots in the universe, practically a toolkit in themselves. Unfortunately they’re still sitting in my cabin on Outward Initiative, unless they’ve already cleaned it out. If they did, hope someone saved the damn things; cost me a months’ salary.”

Tavana blinked. A pair of boots cost someone like the Sergeant a months’ salary? “At that price, sir, they should be doing the walking for you.”

“Damn near could, too.” He sighed. “Anyway, these are solid boots for us both. Wearing ship’s shoes would be an invitation to getting bit, or worse. Here, take these.”

Tavana accepted the pair of padded gray gloves and pulled them on; he was glad to take any protection offered. The work gloves fit well enough, and had gripping surfaces that made the smooth carbonan pole easy to hold. “Guess I’m ready.”

“All right.” Tavana saw Sergeant Campbell get the distant look of someone activating their omni, looking at things others couldn’t see. “Xander, you hear me?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Xander’s voice answered; apparently either Campbell had cut Tavana into the conversation, or Xander had. “What’s up?”

“I’m going to be checking out potential burrows here with Tavana. If you hear gunshots, don’t panic; I’ll check in within a few minutes. If you don’t hear me check in within, say, five minutes of a shot, give me a holler. Otherwise, just keep fishing. Any luck?”

“We just got our first lines out after finishing making the hooks out of the steel wire Maddox dug out of the one crate. That stuff’s tough – took two of us to bend it into shape. But that means it’s going to be a good hook, I think. Anyway, we’ve baited one with a couple of those shield-like bug things, and I put some of the jerky out of one of the rations on another.”

“Sounds good. You boys enjoy a day fishing, just keep your eyes out for anything dangerous. And if you see anything that makes you nervous, son, you just get out of there and make for the shelter – or LS-88, if you feel you need to. Don’t worry about being too cautious. Got it?”

“Yessir.”

“All right. Have fun. Campbell out.” His eyes refocused and he nodded. “Okay, Tavana, it’s our turn to have fun.”

Tavana felt his heart starting to beat faster. “Oui, fun. I am hoping, Sergeant, that this will be a very boring job.”

“Me too, son. You’re half-joking, but believe me, that’s no joke. Nothing I’d like more than to have a real boring time out here, finding empty holes.”

Tavana approached the circular region of dirt cautiously – with the pole in front of him. “Where should I stand?”

“Wherever you like. I’ll stand just a little ahead of you and to the side, so there’s no chance I shoot you instead of whatever’s in the hole. I’ve got my omni tied in to my retinals; military targeting link. Later, we’ll have to figure out a way to program something like that for you people. Faster shooting and a lot safer, done right.”

“I might be able to do that. I do games programming and interfaces, some a lot more complicated than Jewelbug.”

“Well, we’ll look into it. You ready?”

Tavana swallowed, gripped the pole tighter. “I… think so.”

Campbell grinned. “No, you ain’t. Here. Relax that grip a hair. Hold it like this.” He repositioned Tavana’s hands. “See? You can push or pull better that way, and you can let go easier, if things go bad. Don’t hold onto it with a deathgrip; not only does that give you a lot of control problems, it’ll wear out your muscles fast, then you’ll have to stop sooner and rest.”

“Okay.” He forced his hands to relax the tiniest bit. “Ready now, sir?”

“Guess we are.” The Sergeant raised his pistol. “Go to it.”

Tavana put the tip of the pole in the middle of the circular patch of dirt and pushed. The pole sank slowly into the dirt, which stubbornly contested the way but yielded nonetheless. He was five centimeters in, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five –

The pole abruptly slid downward half a meter.

“Whoa, there. You’ve gone through. Definitely a hole.”

“Definitely. I don’t feel anything under the pole; empty air.”

“Push it down until you hit something, or until you’ve gone a full meter and a half.”

At just over a meter he hit something hard. “Rock, I think.”

“Hole probably curves away in some direction. Well, wiggle and scrape it on the bottom a bit. If there’s something in there, it’ll either try to run away if there’s another exit, or might try to drive this invader out.”

Tavana followed the instructions, not exactly happy at the idea of the pole he was using being attacked by some unknown creature that might decide to dig up after whoever was holding the intruding pole, but comforted by Campbell’s confident posture.

But after several minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. “Enough, sir?”

Campbell pursed his lips, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s all we can do for now. Onward.”

They walked a careful spiral, following the same general path as the excavator. The holes weren’t spaced terribly closely, but the size of the clearing they’d made still meant there’d be quite a few. He spotted the next one when he was about ten meters away, which made the Sergeant nod in appreciation. “Good eyes, son. You’ll get the hang of this soon.”

Tavana used the same procedure, and this hole seemed pretty much like the last; twenty, twenty-five centimeters of pretty hard-packed dirt as a cap on top of a hole that was a meter or so deep. Once more he banged and rattled the pole, and nothing happened. “That dirt sticks together pretty well.”

“Noticed that, eh? Yes sir, it’s not just sandy junk. Got some substance to it. Not surprising, of course, all this water, all these things growing in it, but still, that’s got me thinking there might be clay around.”

“Is that important?”

The Sergeant chuckled, shaking his head. “Right now, no. But if we’re really stuck here for the long haul…”

A chill went down his back and crept down his arms, despite the warmth of Emerald’s sun. “Do… do you think we are here for… well, for a long time?” He pulled up the pole, moved on.

The Sergeant was silent for a few minutes, long enough for them to approach the next hole. “Honestly, Tavana? Probably.”

“Won’t they send a rescue party?” Tavana heard his voice rising unsteadily. I… I thought we would be rescued once we got here. Stupid, but…

“I wouldn’t bet on one, son.” The craggy face looked grim. “See, there’s no way that Outward Initiative would just go on about its business. If the ship survived – and I hope it did – it was pretty bad damaged. Maybe took some of that radiation pulse we got. So they’d have to get her back in flying shape.”

Tavana nodded. “I know that, yes. The Trapdoor coils, they would have to be re-tuned for the changed shape of the ship.”

“Right. So that’s a week, two weeks, at least. Then they have to get somewhere they can get fixed. That pretty much has to be Orado, closest colony. About ten light-years from where we dropped off, so figure it took them a couple months to get there.”

“So they have been there a while now, yes?”

“Problem is … at best, they’re gonna have a guess as to where we are in space, because out between the stars there ain’t no road markers. That means that any searchers would be searching a volume probably larger than our solar system back on Earth. That’s … a long, long time searching, looking for something the size of our lifeboat. Years, maybe, less if they have a lot of searching vessels – but they won’t have a lot, because Orado’s not gonna have a bunch of starships on hand for the job. And honestly? They’ll know that anyone in an intact lifeboat will be heading for Orado on their own, taking of course a lot longer to get there, but if they’re well supplied, they’ll make it. If they don’t detect a distress beacon in the right general area, they’ll assume we’ve either headed for Orado… or our ship didn’t survive. They might set up some automated search drones, sort of like unmanned lifeboats… but they’d be looking just for closure, not rescue.”

“But the star! Emerald’s sun, they will see it, yes?” Tavana poked a bit more forcefully at the next dirt-covered hole.

Campbell shrugged. “If someone does a starfield comparison, yes. They’ll notice it. And if someone does that, they might possibly think that survivors could look to that system as a refuge – but only if they think of the possibility that we couldn’t head for Orado.”

The pole sank again, and once more Tavana shook and scraped the end around.

Campbell continued, “But Tav… that’s a really long shot. You’d have to be either crazy or desperate – like we were – to head for an unknown system, even one close by, rather than tighten your belt and make the trip to the inhabited system you know about. Maybe someone will come here. I sure hope so. Just the fact it’s a star not on the charts will make people puzzled. But indulging curiosity with a starship, that’s an expensive whim. More likely they’ll just get someone to take a good look at the system with a telescopic array. They’ll be able to see the planet all right… even make out the continents and larger islands… but not us.”

Tavana pulled the pole out, started walking again, feeling his steps dragging leadenly – a sensation that was not just from gravity, annoying though that was. “So we are stuck here forever.”

Campbell spread his hands. “Maybe not. But we can’t plan for the best; we can hope for the best, but we damned well better plan for the worst.”

Tavana squinted ahead, slowed down. Something’s different…

The Sergeant followed his gaze. “What is it, son?”

“I don’t know. Just… this one isn’t like the others.”

A brilliant smile. “You have got some of the instincts. Wish you’d spent more time working them, but this is good. Look again. Tell me what’s different about this one than the others.”

Tavana stood still, looking, thinking. Finally he nodded. “The others, they were all flat, really smooth. Hard-looking. This one… it has sunk a little in the center, and part of it looks softer.”

The Sergeant nodded; Tavana saw him draw his weapon and check it carefully, and the gun did not return to its holster. “You got it. Looks to me like something might have been digging underneath. Maybe was doing it when we were walking up, and stopped because it sensed our vibrations.”

“Vibration sense? Is that common?”

“Very, especially in subsurface creatures.” Campbell studied the terrain carefully. “All right, let’s do this. Be ready, though; I would not be surprised if things don’t go nearly as smoothly as the others.”

Tavana nodded, and his heart was back to hammering against his ribs. Something is there, I can feel it.

The pole sank into the top layer much more easily than it had in the prior holes, then slowed down, encountering earth of a heavier sort. Tavana pushed –

And something suddenly seized the pole, yanking on it so hard that it was almost ripped out of Tavana’s hands.

But Tavana Arronax was not letting go. As it gave another yank, Tavana braced himself and started pulling.

“You got something, son?”

“Oui. And it wants a tug-of-war? It will have one!”

Tavana found himself grinning, despite the fact that the sudden grab-and-pull had scared him so much he felt his pulse racing and a giddiness in his head. Tug of war was the one thing he’d ever been good at when his school had phys-ed classes. He couldn’t run fast, he couldn’t duck and weave, and he didn’t like punching and wrestling, but with his low, squat build, he could brace and pull better than anyone.

He gripped the pole, tucked it under his arm like a rope, and dug in his heels. The pole stopped, then slid backwards. Tavana braced again, pulled once more. Another step back, and now he could feel a vibration, something scrabbling for a hold, fighting the pull and losing. Then it was harder, but something was still holding on, wriggling as Tavana dragged it through the dirt capping the hole.

With an abrupt rush, most of the pole slid free of the dirt, bringing with it a sinuous, segmented, multi-legged shape. It released the pole, making Tav stagger back, started a lunge –

Three flat, sharp reports shattered the stillness of the day, and the creature was shoved sideways, red-purple blood splashing in the air as it rolled over and then contorted in writhing agony, needle-tipped mandibles slashing empty air.

Campbell studied the thing as its convulsions juddered to a halt, then nodded, sheathing his weapon. “That’s definitely not something we wanted inside the perimeter.”

The two moved a little closer. The creature was serpentine, a long body probably well over two meters long and almost twenty centimeters thick equipped with multiple pairs of legs, two on each body section; Tavana noticed that the frontmost legs shifted from being narrow to broader and contoured. Digging tools, almost certainly. The mouth was mostly closed now, but he could make out what looked like blue-black fangs in the four-sectioned mouth.

“Good shooting, Sergeant,” he said. “That was not a happy animal when he came out.”

“Very unhappy, I think. Thanks. Lemme contact Xander, let him know what’s up.”

As the Sergeant gazed into the invisible distance, Tavana stepped a little closer; this was the first alien lifeform he’d really gotten a good look at, aside from the preserved specimens back home. It looks like a cross between a centipede, a worm, and a lamprey. Terrifiant, creepy, as Maddox would probably say.

The way it was lying, he couldn’t get a good look, but it seemed to have eyes spaced such that there were four of them. And there were four ridges on the thing’s body. Four-sided symmetry? He stretched out his boot and tried to roll the creature over, so he could get a look –

“Tavana, NO!”

The limp body suddenly convulsed at the touch of Tavana’s boot, and the head whipped around, hissing, fangs extended. In the same instant, Sergeant Campbell slammed into him, sending Tavana sprawling, out of the path of the thing’s reflexive strike.

But that left Sergeant Campbell directly in its path.

Wide-stretched mandibles found Campbell’s boot, clamped down. Three of the savage hooked teeth skidded on the Pathfinder boot, getting no purchase, but the fourth slid upward –

And over the top of the boot, plunging directly into Campbell’s leg, just below the knee.

 

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 32

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 32

****

It took a few hours to bring the fleet through the Locus Point jump and out into clear space in the target star system. The fleet wasn’t much larger in terms of combat power than it had been, but Fleet Commander Dannet and Lieutenant General Kralik had agreed that if the fleet was going to go in harm’s way so far from their home stars and without quick access to Ares Base or the other systems of the Jao/human alliance, they’d need to take a lot of supplies with them. Under Caitlin’s oudh Dannet had commandeered every available ship in or near the base system to serve as stores and ammunition ships. Kralik hadn’t emptied the warehouses and storage nexuses of the base to fill those ships, but what he had ordered had put a severe dent in the base’s supplies.

Caitlin was at dinner when the last ship cleared the corona transition. Her com pad beeped at her, and she tapped the accept control with her fork handle while she swallowed a bite. A recent picture of Ed was replaced by Dannet’s face staring out at her.

“Director Kralik,” Dannet began in her usual direct mode.

Caitlin choked down the last of the bite in her mouth. “Yes,” she husked.

“All fleet ships have arrived and are in orbit. Several are in need of minor repairs, but nothing serious was experienced.”

“Good.” Relief flooded through Caitlin.

“I have ordered Bond Ship 15467 to begin laying and activating the framepoint.”

“How long will that take?” Caitlin asked, turning schedules in her mind.

Dannet gave her the typical Jao “as long as it takes” expression through the com pad.

The com pad chimed again, and a message from Lieutenant Vaughan scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “Estimate 36 to 48 hours to deploy, activate and test.”

“Never mind.” Caitlin waved a hand to clear the issue away. “I will call a meeting tomorrow for all senior captains and commanders. Word will go out soon.”

“Understood.”

And with that the com pad cleared and returned Ed’s picture to Caitlin’s view.

****

Tully took a shuttle over to the Lexington to join Caitlin’s meeting.

Wrot fell in beside him as they entered the conference room. “So, how was the jump?”

“Fine,” Tully said blandly, catching a glimpse of Caewithe’s trim figure out of the corner of his eye. She smiled at him for a brief second. He flushed and dropped into his seat.

Wrot took the seat next to him and gave him a direct look.

“No harder than usual,” Tully said. “There were a few tight moments but the Vanta-Captain really knows what he’s doing.”

Wrot’s whiskers moved and his head tilted in one of the Jao postures. Tully guessed at disbelief.

“Okay, we almost got burnt to cinders,” Tully said in a low voice. “Drop it, will you?” His relationship with Caewithe Miller might be in the past, but still, the last thing he wanted to talk about in front of her or Caitlin was how bloody scared he’d been.

Wrot stroked his cheek, and murmured, “We must compare notes.”

“You’ve been on a pathfinder jump?” Tully asked.

Wrot’s form communicated smug even without using Jao body language. Tully could read that rather well.

Caitlin cleared her throat, and Tully faced forward.

“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought since our return to Ares Base,” she said. “From what we’ve seen of the Ekhat presence in the Orion Arm of the galaxy, they appear to have started closer to the center and worked their way out. We have no clue as to whether or not they’re in the Sagittarius Arm. Once we arrive there, if we don’t see them, we will head inward from that point. I believe that will increase our chances of finding an extant society.” She glanced around the table.

“Or increase chances of encountering the Ekhat if they are also in the Sagittarius Arm,” Wrot commented.

Caitlin nodded. Tully noted a tightness around her mouth. She wasn’t happy about that possibility. “A risk I believe we must run.”

Tully also noted that she had not called for discussion. She was growing into this leadership stuff, he thought to himself.

Caitlin looked to Fleet Commander Dannet. “I would like to make the next jump as soon as the frame-point is set and functional. Please plan accordingly.”

“We will be ready,” the former Narvo said. “Is there anything else?”

Caitlin stood. “No. Keep me informed of progress.”

Dannet rose to her feet, her large-even-for-a-Jao body dwarfing all but the Lleix. The rest of the council followed. Tully lingered for a moment, hoping for a quick word with Caewithe. But Caitlin swept out the door ahead of everyone and her bodyguard of course had to go with her.

He started to follow after them, only to see Lim step in front of him.

“Colonel Tully,” she began. He nodded in response, and she continued, “We have an agreement that you will teach me to fight. I am ready to begin.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Tully held up his hands. “I agreed to have you taught to fight. But things are a bit up in the air, right now.”

“And in this fleet, when will they not be?” She looked down and folded her robe a little closer to her body.

Tully noted that Lim’s command of English idiom was rather good. But then, he would expect no less from a Lleix.

“Fair point,” Tully acknowledged. “Part of the problem is that the man I want to begin your training is on Ban Chao, not Lexington.”

“That is not a problem,” Lim replied. She looked at him, black eyes focused on his. “Pyr and I were joined by Garhet of Terralore a few days ago after it was decided that we need to have at least one of us with each of the senior Terra taif leaders. Pyr and Garhet will remain on Lexington to observe and interact with Director Kralik and Wrot. I volunteered to move to Ban Chao to observe you and your jinau leaders. If it is acceptable, I can return to the ship with you now.”

“Wait a minute,” Tully said, holding up his hands again.

“You do not want me?”

“No,” Tully said. Lim seemed to stiffen, and he hurried to say, “I don’t mean I don’t want you on the ship. You just caught me off guard is all.” God, now he was getting in trouble with prickly extra-terrestrial women! What next? “Look, if you want to come over to Ban Chao, I’ll approve that. And yeah, it will make it some easier to start your training. But you’re going to be surrounded by Jao and humans, with no other Lleix on the ship. You sure you want to take that on?”

Lim stared at him for a moment, black eyes unblinking, aureole doing a slow rise around her head. “How will that be different from my life before now?”

Tully looked at Lim; saw the set of her shoulders, the full extension of her aureole, and the stillness of her hands. “Right. We leave for Ban Chao in an hour. Can you be ready by then?”

Lim gave him a human nod, turned and exited the conference room. Tully stared after her. “Women,” he muttered. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, and can’t leave them behind.”

He thumbed the call list on his com pad. A moment later First Sergeant Luff’s face was looking at him out of the surface of the pad. “Colonel? Something I can do for you?”

“Yep,” Tully said. “Top, I need you to notify whoever is in charge of quarters on Ban Chao that we need to find a room for one more. Lim of Terralore elian is going to be joining us.”

“A Lleix?”

“Yep. And Top?”

“Yes, sir . . .”

 

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 46

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 46

Mary Rose blushed. “If we lock in the local suppliers of urine? Hold it. How do we do that? And who are the local suppliers of urine?”

Tracy grinned. “Ted claims that the various drinking houses produce buckets full every day. Currently a lot of it is being dumped via the sewage system. He reckons he and a couple of the cousins can modify the urinals so that the urine is diverted into some barrels rather than the sewer. If we offer to make the modification at no cost in return for the urine, he thinks we could lock in most of the taverns. They’ll save on the toilet tax since they won’t be pumping so much into the sewerage system.”

“Those years with O’Keefe’s are good for something then,” Belle commented with a grin.

“Don’t forget the papers in waste engineering Ted’s done at college. But yes, he’s happy to be able to make a useful contribution to this project.”

Late November 1631, Jena

Maria Anna Siebenhorn sat on the blanket wrapped bundles of the worldly goods of her, her brother, and their friend and leaned against the exterior wall of the bakery and tried to absorb a bit of warmth from the oven’s chimney. Across her body was a stick she could use to defend herself and the bundles, although to use it she would first have to free her hands. She was cold, as one would expect in Jena in November during the Little Ice Age, and she was hungry. Both problems had their origin in her current situation — she was a refugee. It wasn’t that the good citizens didn’t care about the refugees from the wars who had looked to their city for aid, but there were too many of them for the available alms.

Maria, her elder brother Michael, and his friend Kurt had found shelter in the city. They’d also managed to find work, but now that the grape harvest was almost over the vineyards no longer needed so many pickers. The three of them had been without work for three days, which was about the limit the city authorities allowed, and things were strained.

Across the street Maria Anna watched a man approached a young woman who’d been standing in a doorway flashing her wares all the time Maria Anna had been sitting against the wall. They talked, and then, after striking an agreement, they entered the building, the man’s hand clamped firmly to the buttocks of the young woman. Maria Anna knew what was going on, and she shuddered at the idea of doing it herself. She knew that if she and Michael didn’t find work soon, she might be forced into selling her body.

“Maria Anna!”

The shout, almost in her ear, freed Maria Anna from her nightmare. She looked up at her brother. He looked excited. “You’ve found work?” she asked.

Michael nodded. “But we have to be quick.” He hauled Maria Anna to her feet and thrust one of the bundles she’d been sitting on into her arms before grabbing the other two and setting off.

“What sort of work?” Maria Anna demanded as she hurried to catch up with her brother.

“An alchemist is looking for people he can train to produce something for the Americans.”

Maria Anna rushed in front of her brother and turned to confront him. “An alchemist?”

“Yes,” Michael said, “an alchemist. But it’s honest work, with meals and accommodation provided.”

Maria Anna stood aside to let Michael past and walked along beside him. Michael had just said the magic words. She was cold, tired, and hungry, and this job addressed all three of her problems, overcoming any fears she might have about working for an alchemist.

Jena, the shop floor of Dr. Phil’s new laboratory, a few days later

Phillip passed his eyes over the hard-working young urchins he had recruited as laborants to make the “baking soda” for the American women. He smiled to himself as he remembered his victory over naming of the product. Who would want to be known as the man who makes “baking soda?” Sal Aer Fixus, now there was a product to be proud of. Any alchemist worth the title would immediately respect the abilities of the man who can produce Sal Aer Fixus. Baking soda was for cooks.

“Hans.” His high-pitched squeal penetrated the noise of the laboratory. “Did I tell you to stop grinding the ice maker?” All eyes turned to Hans Saltzman, who had hastily returned to grinding the icemaker.

Phillip walked up and down the production line checking on his workers. For a pack of illiterate street refuse, they had taken to the work well. Most of them didn’t understand what they were doing, but they were all capable of following his clear and concise instructions. At the ringing of a bell, everybody concentrated on finishing the current batch. As the batch passed from station to station, the youths cleaned down their work stations before helping other workers clean up. Soon, the batch was finished and ready for packaging in the fancy new paper bags the Grantville ladies had supplied. Waving his workers off to the noon meal, Phillip ran a finger over the image printed on some of the bags, a woodcut portrait, with “Gribbleflotz’s Sal Aer Fixus” written around the border. The image was very good, if he did say so himself. The artist had managed to catch his true essence. He appeared suitably regal and dignified. On the back of the bag there was more printing. There was a list of several uses for Gribbleflotz’s Sal Aer Fixus, including a recipe for the America culinary atrocity they called “biscuits.”

He gave the workroom one last sweep with his eyes. What he saw filled him with pleasure. The workroom and his personal laboratory had been fitted out to his specifications, with a few suggestions from the Americans, at considerable expense. The Americans themselves had come in and done much of the work setting up the laboratories. They now boasted “fume cupboards,” something that was especially valuable when dealing with fermented urine and Spirits of Hartshorn, and easy to drain hot and cold baths. There was even running water, as long as the tanks were kept topped up.

Passing into the dining room, Phillip waved the laborants back to the important task of eating. He well remembered the times when he had lacked sufficient food to eat, and had insisted to the Grantville ladies that the laborants should eat as well as he and Frau Mittelhausen. His eye caught on a couple of the laborants. They were some of his best workers, in spite of being female. If they caused any trouble it would be up to Frau Mittelhausen to deal with it. After all, that was what she was paid to do.

He walked into his study. A cloth-covered tray sat on the table where he wrote up his research and did his accounts. Not that he had to do many accounts since the ladies from Grantville had encouraged him to join them in a company. Frau Mittelhausen did all that, and ran the household. All he had to do was ensure the baking soda was prepared according to the recipe, and that sufficient quantities were being made. He relaxed in his chair before removing the cloth covering his lunch. The steam rising from his simple meal reminded Phillip of the meals he had been eating only a few weeks ago. Those meals had been anything he could buy cheaply and eat quickly before returning to his laboratory where he did assays and other work to pay off his debts. He cast an eye to the shelf where his lucky crystal now sat. He would be a lot more careful with his money in future.

He had recently started training a couple of the better laborants to do assays. Soon he would be able to leave them to conduct the rote aspects of the assay work while he concentrated on more important things. Meanwhile, he was receiving a good income from the company just for supervising its production of Sal Aer Fixus. He smiled, remembering the contract the Grantville Ladies had had him sign. He received a salary, and a share of any profits, all without having to pay a Pfennig towards the costs of the wretched baking soda.

 

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 16

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 16

Chapter 16.

“This,” Campbell said, “Is a JD-CAT Model 450 Universal Excavator.”

The boys were all watching attentively, even Francisco. Heavy machinery still held a fascination for most children, and these – thank goodness – were no exception.

He walked around the big machine and smacked the wide, thick bar that was held up by the manipulator frame. “Excavator is just part of what the 450 can do, though. This is a fully controllable advanced SMA – Shape Memory Alloy – universal blade component, similar to the main control surface units on LS-88. It can be a bulldozer blade, a backhoe scoop, a snowplow – pretty much any kind of tool you need to clear an area, dig a hole, smooth the ground, and so on. The rear “ripper” attachments are also SMA units, and can be configured for hole digging and other operations.”

“Cool,” Maddox said with a broad grin.

“It is that,” he agreed. “We have four of these beasts, each one massing fifteen metric tons, and believe me, Tantalus colony’s gonna be real unhappy they don’t have them. These were designed specifically for new colony setup.”

Campbell grabbed the door, opened it, and swung up into the small cabin. “C’mon up, take a look. Manual controls built-in and parallel to the automatics.”

“So they can be automated?” Tavana asked. “That will be useful!”

“You better believe it. We’ll start out doing things by manual, because with the AIs knocked out by that Trapdoor pulse, we can’t count on them to make the right evaluations and decisions. But once our satellite network gets established, we’ll have an Emerald-centric GPS system to guide everything they do.”

Xander was checking the drive systems along with Tavana. “Superconductor loop batteries, right?”

“Right. No fuel, minimal maintenance – moving components sealed as much as possible, with near zero-wear bearing materials. We just plug her into the shuttle mains and recharge every so often.”

Francisco looked at the machine longingly. “I wish I could drive it, but I’m too small.”

“Maybe not,” said Tavana.

Campbell looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “How you figure, Tav? His feet won’t even reach the pedal pads.”

Tavana grinned, holding up his omni. “Manual can still be via remote, yes? And I know that Francisco, he is quite good with delicate control in the games.”

Yeah, but still, that’s fifteen tons of machinery with a lot of power behind it. But he caught Tavana’s meaningful stare, and knew what the kid was up to. Francisco’s an artist and a kid; he’s not like the rest of these boys, an engineer or on the way to being one. He wants to contribute, and Tavana wants to show him a way he can.

And, Campbell had to admit, it couldn’t hurt to have someone with an artist’s as well as an engineer’s eye in on the work. If they were going to be stuck here, letting Francisco try to add aesthetic touches would be a good thing.

“That’s… not a bad point at all, Tav,” he said, after a momentary pause. “Tell you what: I’ll start teaching Xander and Maddox how to run it, but you can hook into the controls in parallel and we’ll see if you can figure out a good control interface that Francisco can use. I’m not giving any remote control, though, until I’m sure whoever’s doing it knows exactly what they’re doing; this thing can do a lot of damage real fast.”

The others nodded, and Xander said, “So what’s our plan, sir?”

“I want to clear a perimeter all the way around us,” Campbell said, gesturing in an arc around them. “Clear the ground, make sure there’s no surprises waiting for us in our base camp. Take everything down, out to about fifty meters in all directions from LS-88, down to the water’s edge in the direction of our little lake there.”

Maddox frowned. “We’re just going to wipe out everything around us? That’s pretty mean! What about the animals and things that already live here?”

Campbell sighed. “Son, if this was a proper survey and colonization setup, you’d probably be right. Modern approach to colonization is to try to find a way to fit in. But honestly, Maddox, even there, once we decide that we’re setting up a colony in a given area? Everything has to go that might be dangerous, or even just something that’ll weaken the structures you’ll be building.”

He pointed out at the towering spiral-leaved trees, the distant columns that he couldn’t quite figure out, the shadows under the trees. “We don’t know anything about what lives here. We don’t know if we’re sitting on top of, oh, a nest of chojago like they ran into on Porlumma, sort of super-fire-ants, and we sure don’t want to find out the hard way. It may not be the proper environmental approach, but for survival this is the way we have to do it. Everything for a certain radius around this ship goes. Got it?”

Maddox bit his lip, but then nodded. “Yes, Sergeant.”

“Good.”

The controls of the Model 450 were fairly simple; manual control of a bulldozer, backhoe, and similar machinery really hadn’t changed in centuries. Handgrips to steer, hand and foot controls for moving forward and backward, for raising and lowering the blade or bucket, and so on. He configured the universal blade to a standard “scraper” blade shape, lowered it, and – after making sure all the kids were well clear – started forward.

Unlike the old-fashioned internal-combustion designs, the 450 didn’t roar and rumble, but it did move forward with massive authority, and the sound of earth and stone and plants being torn and scraped was loud and emphatic. Moving nice and smooth. That’s good.

He noticed movement to the rear. “Hey! Boys, don’t follow me! You can keep monitoring and watching, but you stay right there at the ship!”

“I thought I’d just look at what you were uncovering, Sergeant,” Xander said, slightly defensively.

“You gotta start thinking more paranoid, son. What if there was a nest of… something, like I mentioned? What do you think the reaction’s gonna be? You boys have to stay away from the machine in case something here takes violent exception to our trying to clear everything up.”

There were no arguments to that, and he was pleased to see the boys simply went and watched from the main ramp; his occasional glimpses showed that Francisco was paying close attention to whatever Tavana was doing, so maybe the boy would learn how to run one by remote.

He took the 450 out the full fifty meters and a little more, then turned at right angles and started carving out a wide, flat perimeter border.

Ha! Saw something there, long and pretty nasty looking, wiggled out of a hole ahead of me and ran off into the forest. There’s animals on land and some of them probably dangerous. With the cabin door closed, he wasn’t worried for himself here; even if a swarm of this world’s equivalent of bees or something came after the 450, they’d never get in to bother him. But he was now more sure than ever that they needed this perimeter.

After a couple of hours, he’d managed to cut a swath all around the grounded LS-88, a double-wide pathway of scraped earth showing white, dusty streaks where he’d been digging into rock running a total of several hundred meters. The debris from the scraping ran in a bulwark all around the encampment. “There we go. You got it now, Xander?”

“I think so. Can I try it?”

“I’ll bring her back in and you can. Now, what I want us to do is work from the inside out now, and push everything out. We’ll end up with quite a wall, nice earthworks that’ll discourage casual intruders, and a smooth place for us to set up camp inside those walls.”

“I heard some things running away from you,” Tavana said. “I guess there are some animals here for sure.”

“And probably a lot more farther in. Like I said, when we landed we probably made most things run far, far away. The few things still here were in burrows – which was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to make sure we got rid of.” He finished running the excavator back in to near LS-88. “Once we have the area cleared, we’ll have to pack it down, steamroller it as they used to say, and we can start really getting set up.”

Maddox was looking at the small lake. “Sergeant, do you think we might be able to do some fishing? We saw something jumping out there…”

“I’m sure we will. While your brother gets the hang of clearing our field here, you’re welcome to see if you can figure out some good fishing gear.”

“Should we get out a second excavator?” Tavana asked. “I could start prep on that now.”

He considered, while keeping an eye on Xander’s first hesitant attempts with the 450. “Not right now. Maybe we’ll want two of them, but keeping them charged will be a bit of a chore, and it’s not like we’re going to be building miles of highway. Keep working with Francisco; if he gets a hang of running one of these things by remote, that’ll free the rest of us to do other work.”

Tavana nodded and sat down next to Francisco.

The older Bird seemed to be getting the 450 under control; the movements were smoothing out, and the scraping noise becoming smoother, more constant. Campbell leaned back with a grin, thinking. Positive mental attitude, first aid, shelter, fire, signaling, water, and food. That’s survival in a nutshell. Attitude, well, the kids are doing pretty well on it. We’re not hurt. LS-88’s a dandy shelter, even if I really look forward to getting into something bigger. We’ve got all the fire we need. The SC-178s are the best we can do for signaling. Water’s not a problem, as long as the whole planet isn’t a deathtrap, and we’ve got food for a bit.

He sat down and let himself relax against the hard, strong alloy of one of the landing struts. Not bad, Campbell. Give yourself a pat on the back and five minutes of peace.

“Yeah,” he muttered to himself with a wry grin. He could probably afford five minutes. But not much more, because if his years in the Service had taught him anything, it had been this:

Planets hold surprises.

 

Through Fire – Snippet 31

Through Fire – Snippet 31

The Civilization Game

The market from this side looked too well-lit for us to simply go abroad in it. But we pulled ourselves up into a relatively unlit dock. It might very well have been the same at which I’d seen Brisbois talk to a man before it had all exploded. The whole area looked charred, as though by a conflagration. I wasn’t sure there had been only an explosion here, though. For all I knew the market had been scoured by fire.

We dragged ourselves out of the water and onto broad flagstones of the loading dock, dripping water and trying to catch our breaths.

Corin scouted ahead and around the edge of the gate. When I looked up from squeezing my hair free of water, he was gesturing for us to follow.

We did, around the molded ceramite tables, and past stalls closed with corrugated metal. We heard footsteps and people, but we didn’t see anyone. There were songs and snatches of songs going this way and that. In the dark, in the shadows, it was surprisingly scary, disquieting. It was like listening to the thoughts of the city. The thoughts of the city sung to the tune of popular songs, all of them disturbing and filled with rage; echoing of blood and threats.

We stepped lightly, down the dark paths of the market. Corin took point. I’d guess his male pride required it. But I took care to look ahead myself. I could see farther than he did and likely hear better too, and I made sure I kept us out of trouble. Out of the path of potential trouble, even.

Which is why, when I heard the voices ahead, I half-ran forward, and put my hand in front of Corin, to prevent his going any further. He and Mailys stopped, behind my arm.

“What–” Corin whispered. I put my finger to my lips, and turned so he could see it. Almost soundlessly, I whispered in his ear, “There is noise that way. A crowd. Stay. You and Mailys.”

He glared, and I think it was on the tip of his tongue to tell me he didn’t hear anything. I don’t know why he didn’t, but he didn’t. Instead, he nodded once, curtly.

I went ahead of him.

The crowd was in one of the larger areas. It must have been a courtyard. There had been several of those in the market, circular areas surrounded by stalls, all usually dealing in the same sort of goods, so that housewives could have shopped for vegetables or fish, without leaving the area. Now, in the center of one of them, a crowd had assembled. My first thought was how normal they looked. Average. Like everyone else. Except most of them wore liberty caps. And I could smell blood. The blood likely came from a young man — I think it was a young man, though it was hard to tell — standing in front of one of the stalls.

Atop the stall, standing on the little table normally used to display produce, stood a dark haired, scraggly bearded man. “The people,” he said, “will not tolerate these soi-disant improved people to live. The people,” he said. “Will make this one an example for the others.”

He said a lot of other things, too. And every time he said anything there was applause, and someone struck the young person they held captive.

I didn’t know if he was improved. It’s not something you can smell, or even see, unless you observe someone in action, and in their area of expertise at that.

What I knew for a fact was that they were tearing him apart. I could smell his blood, and I could hear his cries, the cries of someone grown hoarse from screaming.

I could also hear, and distinguish, the panting breaths, the excited heartbeats of the people surrounding him, the grinding of teeth, the fragments of sentences. “The people.” And “Keeping normal people down.” And “Oppressors.”

Fast breath behind me and I turned in time to see Corin and Mailys. Dear God, she had her burner out.

I moved faster than I had before, and pulled the burner out of her grasp. I and grabbed at Corin’s shoulder. I sped them both away.

They protested, both of them, with inarticulate sounds, but I was pulling them too fast, and the crowd was too absorbed in their sadism for it to register. I pushed and pulled the two young people away from the courtyard. I led them to place where I heard no sounds, no movement, hoping that they were deserted… When we reached the gate, there was no guard in a Liberty cap, which made me wonder what had been different the previous time. I didn’t care. I shoved the Mailys and Corin out to the street. They were both now fighting my grasp but unable to break from it.

“We must go back,” Corin said, as soon as I slowed down enough that he had breath to speak. “We must save him.”

“He’s dead by now,” I said. “And there was nothing we could do for him by the time I saw him, except give him mercy. If there had been a regen tank right next to him, we might have been able to do something, but even then I doubt it.”

“How can you know that?”

“I smelled it,” I said. “I heard it. I know.”

Mailys said softly, “She’s right. I did also. I was going to give him mercy.” Then she looked at me. “Who are you? You’re not one of us.”

If I’d put two and two together from what I’d half-heard, I’d have had a pretty good idea that I was, or close enough as would make no difference.

“We’ll talk,” I said, as I dragged them out, keeping an ear out. Corin looked mulish. Mailys looked puzzled, and I wondered what coil I was caught in this time. Was Corin some sort of anti-enhanced person fanatic? It was difficult to believe, but only because I knew what my husband had been like. However, just because you look like someone doesn’t mean you are like someone, and I wasn’t enough of a child to believe otherwise.

They kept quiet. Mailys put the red liberty cap on her head, and I wondered where she’d got it. I could guess she had preserved it in a pocket while we were swimming around the isle.

We emerged into relatively quiet night streets, well away from the market, and I wondered if we should go back to the hotel. Part of me wanted to, at least for the sake of figuring out where Alexis was, and if he was alive. But no. The chances of his being alive, even if Mailys said there had been no body parts in the spray, were small enough. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Right then, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted Alexis Brisbois to be alive or not. I just knew he’d told me to keep Mailys and Corin alive. Or at least I hoped that’s what he meant by children.

It was a small, inarticulate sound from Corin that called my attention. I turned to look where he was pointing. In this street of otherwise unremarkable middle-class townhouses, one looked looted. The door hung crookedly on its hinges. The windows were broken.

I glanced at Corin. “People you know?”

He started to shake his head, then nodded. “Friends,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse. “Of Dad’s.”

“Looks like they were attacked.”

He nodded again, then seemed to make some internal decision, and turned, starting to walk towards the door. I put a hand in front of him. “No,” I said. “No.”

“But I have to see,” he said. “It’s my duty. They might need help. ”

I looked dubiously at the house. There was no sign of movement. If there were anyone in that house, they were as likely to be hostile as they were a friend. Of the three of us, I was more likely to be able to escape if there was trouble simply because I was faster and smarter than most normal, non-bio-engineered humans. “I’ll do it,” I said. “I have … ways of getting out faster.”

“But if there is anyone in there, they’ll know me!” Corin said.

“And if the people who are in there know you but want you killed?” I asked. “Tell me who lives there.”

“Francois. He’s about thirty years old. Dark hair. His wife is Adelie. She’s blond. Twenty something? Their name is Bonnaire. They have a little girl. She’s three — No, five. Her name is Tieri.”

I nodded. “If I see them, I’ll shout I’m your friend, shall I, and then you can come in.”

I ran towards the house, but stopped at the entrance. It was silent, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the smell of blood. Not recent blood, either. I took a deep breath and went in, moving carefully through the shadows.

There was a sound, faint, from a distance, but it didn’t sound like someone in the house. What I mean is it was a sound so distant that it might be coming from a nearby house, or perhaps from outside, in the gardens. No immediate threat to me.

 

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 31

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 31

Chapter 16

The Bond of Ebezon, standing as kochan parent to Terra taif, had constructed several structures on Terra for their own use. All of them were low in build, with the curving lines that pleased the Jao. Most of them were built on coastlines of seas or large lakes. None of them were large; pretention was not part of the Bond’s mode of operation. Unlike the actual kochans like Pluthrak or Dano, the Bond’s focus was not on planets as such. Planets were not possessions to them; they were merely platforms from which to launch ships, squadrons and fleets.

Preceptor Ronz acknowledged that. Nonetheless, over the last two years he had gravitated to one particular Terran Bond structure as a place to go when he wanted solitude, quiet, and time to think.

It was located on the coast of that large island that the Terrans called Greenland; a misnomer if ever there was one. The Terrans had apparently been concerned about a global temperature warming trend before the Jao arrived. Glacier melt on Greenland had been one of the things some of them had pointed to as evidence of “global warming.” However, various bolide strikes on the planet during the planetary conquest and early years of the occupation by the Jao had thrown enough dust and particulates into the atmosphere that the trend had not only been arrested, it had been reversed. And nowhere was that more evident than on Greenland.

Ronz stood, hands clasped behind his back, posture effortlessly neutral, and watched the snow swirl outside. Unlike many of the Jao, he liked cold weather; it was one of the reasons he was drawn to this particular location.

At the moment, he was appreciating the randomness of the snowflakes dancing, yet all the while they eventually submitted to gravity and settled to the ground. A metaphor for something? Perhaps. And perhaps simply a beautiful act by the universe.

One particular swirl swept a cloud of the falling snow upwards. His eyes followed it, and remained gazing upward. Something was changing.

“Caitlin, what are you up to now?” he murmured.

****

The messenger ship from Ban Chao had returned with five days of solar studies on the IS class star during Caitlin’s sleep shift. When she awoke that morning, the Starsifters had finished reviewing the data and were ready to report to her and the Fleet Commander.

“The report indicates that it was good you sent Ban Chao,” Wrot said without greeting as they met at the door of the conference room. “I don’t think any other ship, not even Lexington or Pool Buntyam could have survived what they jumped into.”

“It was an appropriate use of assets,” Dannet said as she entered behind them. Again Caitlin was reminded that Jao were not human. That casual disregard of personal risk of hundreds of crew and jinau just grated on her.

Taking her seat, Caitlin looked to Brakan and Matto. “Well?”

Matto manipulated his com pad, and another hologram sprang into view, a large red globe.

“The target star,” Brakan said. “With the extrapolation from the measurements taken from Ban Chao, we can tell you that even for an IS class variable it is odd. The good news is its cycle seems to be about 60 days for full expansion and contraction. The almost good news is that it appears the expansion cycle is mostly stable, but does fluctuate slightly.”

Matto touched his com pad again, and the hologram began a slow expansion to a point almost half again as large as the original, then began contracting.

“That minimizes the risk?” Caitlin asked after watching a full cycle.

“Yes, Director,” Brakan replied.

“How soon can we jump?”

“In approximately twelve Terran hours,” Brakan said.

Caitlin looked to Dannet. “What’s our status?”

“All ships ready for jump,” the fleet commander replied.

“Give the orders, then.”

“Yes, Director.”

Dannet and Wrot both assumed angles for committed-to-action, and the fleet commander and the Lleix rose and exited the conference room. Wrot looked to Caitlin. “A challenging beginning,” he said.

Excitement flooded Caitlin, an excitement she hadn’t felt since not long after beginning the search for other civilizations. “Maybe so,” she said, “but we have to start somewhere.”

****

Twelve hours later, Caitlin was once again on the command deck of the Lexington, seated at the station near Lieutenant’s Vaughan’s that had become her customary location. He had taken time to program a couple of data feeds from his station to hers, so that she could have at least a minimal idea of what was occurring without having to ask questions or distract any of the crew.

Tamt was standing by her, and another of the bodyguard detail was beside the door. Captain Miller was supposed to join them shortly.

Caitlin knew she was keyed up. She knew that the Ban Chao had survived the jump, so that paved the way for Lexington to jump next. She hoped that meant that Ban Chao had not suffered damage or casualties, but that wouldn’t be clear to them until they arrived themselves.

And if Tully wasn’t there to meet them, she’d kill him.

She gripped the chair arms as build-up toward jump began.

“First framepoint generator set,” one of the crew announced.

“Second framepoint generator set.” That word from another tech came on the heels of the first announcement. Caitlin could feel the vibration in the ship’s structure through her feet.

“Third framepoint generator set.” Now the vibration was stronger, and she thought she heard a low hum, almost a growl.

“Fourth framepoint generator set.”

“Fifth framepoint generator set.”

The last two reports came one right after the other, and the vibration jumped markedly. Caitlin looked down at her hands and noticed that her knuckles were white. She made herself relax, and shifted her posture towards calm-in-storm.

Dannet, of course, had been standing watching everything, unmoving except for her head turning, angles all neutral.

Terra-Captain Uldra looked at readouts over a tech’s shoulder, then straightened.

“Navigator, you may jump.”

****

Tully watched as one after the other, the other ships of the reinforced fleet exited the photosphere of the target star, each seemingly none the worse for the experience. Apparently having the pathfinder ship go ahead really did make a difference in how the other ships could travel. It made Tully all the more appreciative for the Jao’s skill in frame travel.

The first four ships to follow Ban Chao were the battleships: the veterans Lexington, Arjuna, and Pool Buntyam, followed by Sun Tzu, the replacement for the wounded Vercingetorix. Tully heaved a sigh of relief when the last of them cleared the edge of the photosphere and joined the others in clear space. With that much firepower now in place, even if the system had held those who would contest the fleet’s passage, the chances of them succeeding were now remote.

There was a span of a few minutes between ships. When the next one came out of the photosphere and its shape became clear on the main view screen, Tully sat up and took notice.

Vanta-Captain Ginta for a moment slumped into formless posture, then assumed the angles of beholding-pleasant-encounters. An air of relaxation moved through the room in a wave.

Tully stepped up beside the captain and pointed at the screen. “What’s that one?”

“Bond Ship 15467,” Ginta replied.

“Uh-huh,” Tully said. “You want to tell me what kind of ship that is and why she’s with us?”

“That is a framepoint ship,” Ginta said. “It will travel with the fleet and lay framepoints after each jump. Without it, it will be a very long and slow voyage home.”

Tully considered that for a moment. “Good ship to have with us.”

“Indeed.” The captain’s voice was dry enough to serve as a desiccant.

 

Through Fire – Snippet 30

Through Fire – Snippet 30

Horrible Example

I swam deeper and deeper, away from the light. It felt as though my lungs must burst before my hand — extended in front of me — perceived a break between rock and wall. By feel alone, since it was too dim to see this far down, it was hard to tell if I could fit through, but there wasn’t much other choice. The only other choice was to go back to the beach and be shot by whoever had come to arrest Alexis and whoever was supposed to be with him.

Swimming forward, I could touch rock and wall on either side, but nothing caught. I emerged on the other side, into brighter-moonlit water outside the shadowy little cave, and I realized I must swim upwards or drown. My lungs felt near bursting and at any minute, my mouth would open against my will, trying to get air that simply wasn’t there.

I made a rush for it, swallowing three gulps of water before I was clear-headed enough to realize that no, there was no one pointing a burner at me, which of course, was a possibility. It was possible that it was a small detachment and that, as such, it was surrounding the cove only. Or, depending on how badly whoever it was who had sent them wanted to apprehend Alexis and his presumed accomplices, the capturing party could have extended here.

But when I surfaced there was no one there. I’d have seen anyone waiting because there was no beach on this side.

Beaches on seacities were always artificial constructions, at least beaches as they were shown in holos and as people imagined them, with sand leading on to a gentle slope into the ocean. Seacities having been poured in dimatough, and anchored to the ocean floor in some way I wasn’t sure I understood, back in the twenty first century, were … one piece. There would, I suppose, in time, be sand on their beaches, and their beaches would become graduated as the sea wore away at the dimatough.

But right then and there, unless beaches were constructed and sand flown in, the seacity floor, upon which all construction rested, ended abruptly at the water’s edge. Save for where harbors had been constructed, the most common view of a seacity was as of a black or gray cliff rising out of the sea.

And on this side of the rocks, no one had built a beach. There was the cliff and, at the base of it, the not uncommon bit of a lip, little more than a natural shelf created in the pouring of the dimatough.

I thought that I’d need to swim to it and lie down to rest. After that, I could think of where to go, but first I must be able to think, and I was still shaky from holding my breath so long.

Then I wondered where the two young people were and realized, with a groan, that I might need to swim back and get them.

This was just before two blond heads popped up out of the sea, close to me. The first was Corin’s, and he broke the water surface gasping, snorting and coughing, indicating that the holding of his breath had failed sometime before he made it to the air. The second was the young woman who’d been waiting for Alexis, her blond hair streaming water and glued to her head while she blinked. She looked far more composed than Corin.

I caught their eye and gestured with my head towards the shelf-like feature. Corin nodded, and when I pulled myself up to the ledge, and sat on it, he sat next to me, and then the girl pulled herself up next to him.

“I beg pardon,” I said. “I should have come up to guide you. I was going to see if there was a passage, and by the time I found it, I needed to see if I could get through.”

Corin gave me an odd look. “Why should you have come back? We are grownups, and we could find our own way. We did.”

I almost said Alexis had told me to look after them, but suddenly realized they might resent the sentiment as well as the fact he’d called them children.

“I think,” the girl said, her voice higher. “Alexis told you to get us out of there, didn’t he?”

“Who are you?” I asked, taken with the sudden certainty she must be his daughter, or someone he trusted as much. I remembered the name that Dechausse had called down. “Mailys Bonheur?”

She inclined her head. “They call me that,” she said.

“And you were working with Alexis Brisbois?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then suddenly shrugged with the air of a woman throwing it all on the line. “In a way. I was his …secretary,” she said. And as though she thought I’d judge it unlikely, which I did for someone so young, she added, “No, secretary trainee, you see. Clerk in the offices. I barely escaped on the night… the night of the ball. Alexis has been trying to track us down, look after us.”

For reasons I couldn’t imagine, Corin looked stricken. He stared at the young woman then said, “You?” in an accusatory tone.

That seemed to confuse her. She blinked at him, “Yes, why?”

“Oh, nothing at all,” he said.

“I take it you don’t approve of your father’s work?”

Corin groaned. “Ah, papa, papa.”

I thought it was all very strange. Did he mean to imply this young woman had been his father’s lover? It seemed hardly credible. I’d seen the relationship between Doctor and Mrs. Dufort. Perhaps Corin just imagined things? He wouldn’t be the only sensitive young man who endowed his elders with a fantasy life they’d never had.

“I think,” I said, carefully steering the conversation. “That we need to get out of here. They might not think to look for us here, then again they might.”

“Do you think Brisbois killed himself with that grenade?” Corin asked.

“There was no flesh in the spray,” Mailys said, with certainty.

Corin gave her an almost frightened look. “It was too fast to see.”

“No, I saw. There was no flesh in the spray.”

I suddenly felt exactly as I’d felt in the evenings at Len’s parents’ home. He had an older sister who had three teenage children, and when they got to arguing, no matter how stupid the argument, you simply couldn’t stop them.

“Whether he killed himself or not,” I said, “they might, sooner or later, look here. And even if they don’t, we can’t stay on this little ledge the rest of eternity. Surely, Corin, this is not why you stayed behind instead of allowing Brisbois to get you to safety with your parents.”

“No,” he said. “I– Something must be done. I always wanted a revolution, that would, you know, set people free. But they are hurting people. They are hunting them down.”

“This surprises you?” Mailys asked.

“I mean they’re hunting down everyone, not just enhanced people,” he said, in a tone of justification. “They burned down our neighbors’ house just because they thought it was ours.”

“Revolutions,” I said, feeling about three thousand years old, “are not known for calm and precision.”

“But–”

“But you can’t wait to help them?” Mailys asked. “To cleanse the world of those who are genetically engineered with superior traits? Because only after that can you be free? When you know there are no people engineered to be your superiors?”

“I never said that,” Corin protested.

“No? But you applauded it. You’re not totally unknown to me, Corin Dufort. I saw you at one of Madame Parr’s speeches.”

At that point, I was ready to plunge into the sea, even if there were no land anywhere in sight, no matter if I died, just to get away from the bickering children. I understood for the first time why Brisbois had called them children.

I was still not sure what game Brisbois was playing, nor was I reassured about his devotion to Simon, but I knew for a fact now that he was at least trying to gather the palace personnel and keep them safe. Or at least, he’d come for Doctor Dufort.

“Come,” I said. “Corin, how near are we to what might be a safe point to swim to? Or do we have to go back where we came from and pray?”

He chewed on the corner of his lip, thinking. “That way,” he pointed, opposite from where we’d come. “Oh, not very long. Around that bend, and we might find other ledges to rest on along the way. Then we’ll come to a loading dock for the vegetable market.”

“Not the vegetable market,” I said, remembering the explosion, and Simon and the revolutionary guards. “It will be guarded.”

He looked confused. “It’s the closest place, short of going back. And back there, they might have people waiting for us.”

I sighed. “All right.” It occurred to me that perhaps the revolutionary guard had moved on, after going over the place. “We’ll try it. We can always come back.”

We plunged into the water and swam to the place I’d barely escaped with my life before.

 

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 15

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 15

Chapter 15.

“No, Maddox, Tav, no one but me and the Sergeant gets armed.”

“But Xaaaaaander –”

“No but Xander, Maddox. You don’t even know how to handle a gun yet, and I don’t think that Tav or Francisco do either.”

The other boys glared at him and Campbell, but finally the glares turned to pouts. “Well… okay. You’re right.”

“Good listening, kids,” Campbell said. “Guns are not toys. We’ve got several from the cargo, so if and when I think you boys are ready, all of us can, and will, be armed when we go out. But for now, Xander’s the only one who’s convinced me I can trust him with something that might put a hole in me if he plays with it wrong.”

“But we all want to go out!” Francisco said.

Xander shook his head. “Francisco, I know you do. But we haven’t got a clue as to what might be waiting out there, and until we do have an idea, we’re not taking anyone else out. Now, you guys can do something, and that’s digging out that temporary shelter and making sure it’s in good condition before we bring it outside and set it up.”

Maddox looked at him with just a bit of resentment and then shrugged it off. “Okay, bro. We’ll do that. Anything else?”

“Check inventory on food,” Campbell said, “and then start checking readiness on the construction equipment we brought with us. I know we chose the motors we did to minimize damage to the cargo, but I want you boys to make sure we didn’t do any real damage to them before we actually try to make use of them.”

“Got it, Sergeant,” Tavana said.

“All right. Let’s take a look at our new home, then.”

The Sergeant went first, stepping into the airlock and opening the outer door; that was no surprise. Xander hadn’t even tried to argue otherwise – it would make no sense for the less-experienced mechanical engineer to stick his head out on an unknown world rather than the soldier with a couple decades of knocking around colony worlds and dealing with whatever they could throw at him.

That didn’t stop Xander from feeling a little jealous.

Sergeant Campbell stepped down and mostly out of sight, then gestured for Xander to follow. Xander opened the inner lock and stepped in, closing the door behind him.

It was the smell that struck Xander first. There was a lingering smell of burning packing fluff and alcohol, but dominating everything was a sharp, sweet freshness, something that he couldn’t describe precisely, but that shouted outdoors! in an unmistakable, joyous way. Faint hints of other smells – heated metal from the LS-88 as she cooled down, spicy scents of flowers, and a grassy smell that he thought must be from whatever they’d landed on. He stepped to the outer lock and took a deep breath.

“Yeah, that’s something you wait for after every trip,” Campbell said from just below him. “First breath of real air. Especially after you’ve been in a tin can like this one.”

For a few moments, Xander couldn’t answer. He was taking in the panorama before him. He’d seen the landing site from the air, but that had been a quick glance, through a camera’s eye. Now they were down on the ground, and he was seeing everything himself.

They were sitting in a small clearing – scarcely two or three times as wide as LS-88 was long – bordered by towering growths crowned with what looked like delicate green sprays of fine hair, but were probably tough, slender strands. Interspersed with these were other treelike things with spiral green sheets that were definitely leaves, and huge columns rearing dozens of meters into the air. He could hear faint noises in the distance – piercing calls, sounds like chiming, answering chimes or screeches – and saw brightly-colored somethings darting in and out of the forest canopy. Nearer, tall growths with banded joints grew side by side with swaying grass-like things that almost had to be plants, and sparkling-winged somethings dancing among them. The sound of running water chuckled somewhere on the other side of LS–88.

Campbell’s chuckle broke into his reverie finally. “It sure is pretty, I’ll say that for it.”

Xander looked down, to see the Sergeant standing on the last rung of the ladder; he had not yet stepped down. Campbell grinned up at him. “You want to take the first step, son?”

A huge rush of gratitude roared through him, and he felt an incredibly stupid grin spreading across his face. But… “I… of course I would, sir, but shouldn’t you…?” It was hard to say, but it was the right thing to say; without Campbell, they’d never have gotten here.

Samuel Campbell shook his head, but returned the grin. “Can’t say it’s not a major temptation, Xander; even with all the exploring we’ve done, you could get all the people who’ve been the first to step foot on another world into one auditorium, and it wouldn’t be all that full even after two hundred years. But,” his grin broadened, “I’d already be in that auditorium, son, and you wouldn’t.”

Xander felt a momentary sting of tears. “I don’t think I can say thank you enough, sir.”

“The way you’re smilin’ says it all, Xander. Now take that first step.”

He climbed part-way down, then measured the way his legs felt. “I think it might be more like a jump and fall.”

“Be careful. We’ve flattened stuff nearby, but any farther and who knows what you’ll hit.”

Xander gave a tiny jump and let go, passing the Sergeant by inches. The impact felt like he was landing with a couple other people on his back, after all that time weightless, but somehow he stayed on his two feet, not falling, and slowly rose. “And that’s one tiny leap for mankind,” he said. “Welcome to Emerald!”

“Well, nothing’s leapt out of the grass to kill us yet. Good sign.”

“Did you expect something to?”

“Nah, not really. Something more than thirty meters long made of metal drops screaming out of the air and lands in your field? Anything halfway sane’s running as far as it can go until it’s sure nothing more’s going to happen. Predators don’t survive by attacking things they don’t know, anyway. Main danger on planets like this for newbies like us? Dangers that look harmless until we touch them, kick them, sniff them, or eat them. Or walk past ’em – had a trooper get killed once when we walked past what looked like just any other hole in the rock and something jumped out and whacked him.”

Xander looked around with more caution and suspicion at the waving grass, brush, or whatever-it-was, and realized that stuff that grew almost a meter tall could hide a lot of things.

Campbell nodded. “That is the look you need, son. Until we’re familiar with this place, we haven’t got the faintest idea of what could kill us. There’s risks we really can’t avoid – if the equivalent of the grass is lethal, we’re pretty much hosed. But even there I wouldn’t yank up a stalk and stick it in my mouth to whistle with until we’re damn sure it’s not filled with strychnine or something.”

“What now, Sergeant?”

Campbell surveyed the area. “I want to walk a perimeter around the LS-88, then – if everything looks kosher – we’ll get out one of the excavators.”

“Why – oh. You want to make a real perimeter.”

“You got it, son. First rule of safety – clear out any possible threats and establish a secure camp. Sure, we can stay inside LS-88, and that’s pretty much a damn fortress, but we really need to get used to staying here. And that’s not happening if we use the ship as an excuse to keep from acting like colonists. You were all going to be colonists, well, here’s your chance.”

Xander followed Campbell, who was proceeding up towards the nose of LS-88 with careful, measured steps, surveying everything as he went along. “Well, we were planning on arriving at an already established colony.”

“Can’t give you one of those, though.” Campbell stopped, touched a point underneath LS-88‘s front cabin. “Hmm. There’s the problem child.”

Xander looked, seeing a blackened streak. “What is it?”

“Don’t know for sure. Some small flaw, probably minor damage from the accident. It affected the TPS deployment just a tiny bit and almost led to burn-through. So I wouldn’t want to try another landing with her.” Campbell grinned and patted the lander. “But she did her job long enough.”

Xander repressed a shudder. He hadn’t realized they’d come that close to being a flaming wreck. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Would you?”

That stopped him. He considered a moment. “I guess not. No point in it.”

“Exactly. If it’d holed-through, we’d all have been dead in seconds. No point in worrying anyone with it.” They rounded the nose. “Well, now, isn’t that a pretty sight?”

Stretching away from them, starting perhaps fifteen meters from LS-88, was a sparkling sheet of pristine blue water, rippling slightly from wind and the tumbling waters of the stream feeding the little lake. “Do you think that’s fresh water?”

“I’d bet on it, though the lake itself might be brackish. The stream’s almost certainly fresh water.”

Without warning, something leapt from the water, far out in the lake, and came down with a splash; Xander had a momentary impression of a slender body trailing more fins than he might have expected. “Wow!”

“Wow indeed. That beast was more than a meter long, easy. Maybe twice that, hard to tell at this distance. Looks like we can expect to do some fishing if we’re lucky.”

“If we can eat it.”

“Well, that will be the question, yes. But we know from Earth and other planets that there’s some basic rules we can follow that make it safer. Like not eating the innards of animals in general, until we’ve had a chance to test ’em.” Campbell surveyed the area. “Let’s keep going, but right now I’m inclined to stay right here. Looks about as good a spot as we could hope for.”

“We don’t need an excavator to clear an area for the shelter, do we?”

“Technically… no. Practically speaking, I would strongly recommend it. What if the local grasses can poke holes in your shelter?”

“Well, we did clear out some areas right around the jets when you landed.”

“So we did. But I also avoid camping right underneath nuclear jets, on basic principle alone.”

Xander laughed, but he had to agree that there was something unsettling about the idea of sitting directly beneath a high-powered jet engine. He squatted down and looked carefully at the soil. Near the edges, he could see some shield-shaped things scuttling about. “I see beetles or something.”

“Careful.” With practiced ease, Campbell bent over and impaled one on a needle-fine spike from his ShapeTool. “Hm. Not exactly anything we know – no surprise. Crustacean of some sort, exoskeleton and all. Mandibles look like they could nip through flesh, anyway, don’t know about cloth. Might be plant-eaters, though. Don’t show any response to one of their fellows’ deaths – not that I expected them to, or we’d have seen swarms all over the place after the landing.” He scraped the thing off against LS-88, then wiped off the Shapetool. “But where there’s one thing like that, there’s probably ten thousand species ranging from harmless to very nasty. And – whoops! Will you look at that?”

“That” was one of the plant-things, which had been exhibiting what Xander had thought were brilliant red flowers composed of many hairlike petals, like asters. But as they approached and the Sergeant’s boot landed near – or perhaps touching – the stem, the “flowers” suddenly withdrew into a bulge on the stem. “What is it?”

“Dunno. Could be a plant, still – seen some on various planets that move. Mimosa’s one on Earth – touch it and it folds up fast. But it looked more like an animal movement to me. Interesting.”

They had reached the tail section, and could look up the stream to where it disappeared into the forest; low hills were visible in the distance. He saw Campbell frown and shake his head.

“What is it?”

“Those hills. I know we haven’t seen but a fraction of the planet yet, but near as I can tell there isn’t a mountain on this planet worthy of the name. Most of ’em wouldn’t even qualify as hills. I think the highest peak I saw might just barely clear three hundred meters. Most habitable worlds have pretty active tectonics, so you get plenty of mountains somewhere on the planet. Never seen a habitable world without decent mountain ranges. It’s a puzzle.”

Then he shook himself. “Well, anyway, the cargo bay door’s here, and clear. Looks like we can get to work! Get inside and let’s get started!”

Xander glanced at the hills himself, but he had to admit he didn’t really understand what was bothering the Sergeant. But first things first. “Coming in, Maddox, Tav,” he said, seeing in his omni that it had switched to the proper channels. “We’re gonna get one of the excavators working!”

 

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 45

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 45

Phillip flashed his eyes over the recipe again, then looked back at Tracy. “Of course. Any marginally competent student of alchemy could easily make this ‘baking soda.’ The ‘baking powder’ . . . a little time in the laboratory, and that too can be made.”

“Well, can you at least help us find someone to make it?”

“I am not a procurer. If you wish someone to make this baking powder you must find them yourself. Now, please. I wish to get back to real work. Do not bother me with ‘cooking.'”

“Herr Doctor Gribbleflotz, we can pay, and pay well for this baking soda. Won’t you please reconsider?”

Phillip stared at Tracy. There was no way he could afford the time it would take to research how to make their cooking powder while also keeping up his acid volumes. And he couldn’t see them compensating him for the income he’d have to forgo. “No. It’s impossible. I’m too busy…” He moved suggestively, trying to usher his visitors out of his laboratory.

“What about a couple of sets of clothes? Tailored to fit. With pockets, zippers, and buttons. In the fabric and color of your choice.” Tracy was almost desperate.

Phillip stopped midstride and turned to look at the up-timers. He’d heard stories about the new colors coming out of Grantville. His eyes traveled up and down Ted, examining the denim trousers, plaid linen shirt and leather jacket. Then they moved onto the woman. Again the denim trousers, a bright yellow-green shirt with a canary yellow chemise. Her jacket was a fabric he didn’t recognize but the color was a bright blue he had never seen. The styles weren’t anything he particularly admired, but the colors were amazing. Yes, the offer was appealing. With a couple of sets of clothes in the new colors he could afford to sell some of his other clothes. That would be enough to justify the research, and if they really were prepared to pay him well for the cooking powder, then he’d come out ahead, and he’d be able to redeem his lucky crystal sooner. Still, he couldn’t tell them that, nor could he allow them to think he’d caved in too easily. His eyes settled on the wedged heeled shoes Frau Kubiak was wearing. “I want shoes like yours, Frau Kubiak, with the elevated heels.”

“Yes, even shoes with elevated heels.”

His ego firmly stroked by Tracy’s complete capitulation Phillip held out his hand. “Give me another look at that recipe. I believe we can talk business.”

****

Phillip watched the American man and woman walk away. He ran his fingers through his goatee beard as he looked into the distance, seeing himself in his new clothes. A fine figure of a man, commanding, dignified, the target of envy from less fortunate beings. Drawing his attention back into his rooms, he looked about his suddenly shabby quarters and laboratory. Maybe, if the Americans were as good as their words, he could move into accommodations more befitting Herr Doctor Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the World’s Greatest Alchemist. With the advance payment they had promised he could obtain supplies, employ laborants to do the dull repetitive tasks, and even keep his creditors at bay. Yes. If the Americans came through he could purchase some of that new glassware Herr Geissler was making after his visit to Grantville. With the areas of investigation the new glassware opened, soon those narrow-minded imbeciles of the university would kneel before Herr Doctor Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the World’s Greatest Alchemist, begging him to accept one of their diplomas. Begging him to join the staff of their university. One day . . .

Sunday lunch, Tracy and Ted’s place

“Well?” Tasha asked significantly, staring inquiringly at her cousin by marriage. “Did you find us an alchemist to make baking soda?”

Holding her mug in both hands Tracy took a sip of tea before looking over the lip of the mug at the expectant faces surrounding her. “No.” She paused, teasing them. The quiet groans of disappointment were interrupted by Danielle breaking into a fit of the giggles. “We found someone better.” With that Danielle started to roar with laughter. Tracy limited herself to a broad smile as she too tried to imagine Herr Doctor Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz as being “someone better.” “The guy is a bit of a pompous ass. But at least he’s willing to make our baking soda.”

“When can he have it ready?” asked Mary Rose.

“At the moment he’s only making a test sample. He said he needs at least a week for the urine to properly mature so as to produce the best Spirits of Hartshorn.”

“Gross.” Erin shook her head in disgust. “What are Spirits of Hartshorn?”

“Ammonia. Spirits of Hartshorn is what it’s called here and now. And quite frankly, I think it will be less trouble if we learn to use whatever names Herr Doctor Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz wants to use.”

Belle’s forehead creased. “Hang on. He’s a doctor? But you said you couldn’t find an alchemist.”

“He’s not an alchemist. For that matter, Ted says there is some doubt that he’s a doctor, at least not from any reputable university. Anyway, he said he could deliver a couple of pounds in about two weeks’ time.”

Two weeks later, Sunday lunch at Belle’s

“Now for the big test. Everybody take a bite and let’s see what we think.” Belle passed a plate of steaming biscuits around the table.

“Mmmm, nice. Different from baking powder biscuits, but still very good,” Tasha volunteered. The other women nodded and agreed that the biscuits were good.

Tracy looked over her friends, “So we are agreed that Dr. Phil . . .”

“Dr. Phil?” Belle’s raised eyebrows were duplicated by the rest of the girls.

“That’s just Ted’s name for Herr Doctor Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz,” Tracy replied.

“I thought he claimed he never watched Oprah?”

Tracy smiled at Belle. Ted had often made that claim. However, it seemed he had been a little economical with the truth. “Anyway, are we agreed that we should look at getting Dr. Phil making lots of baking soda?” At the nods of agreement, Tracy continued. “Then we have to think about raising capital. I’ve made enquiries. Dr. Phil will need to rent new facilities, buy additional hardware and supplies. He will also need to employ some people he can teach to do the work. We will also need to supply someone to manage everything when Dr. Phil loses interest and goes back to his pet projects. I’m thinking that if all the family can contribute maybe a thousand dollars per household to the project we can raise at least twenty thousand dollars. That should be enough to get him started, and running for at least three months.”

“Hang on, Tracy. What are we going to get for our investment?” Mary Rose frowned. “A thousand dollars is a bit steep for a few pounds of baking soda.” The other ladies looked at Tracy, nodding agreement.

“I’m suggesting that we set up a manufacturing company with Dr. Phil as the head or consulting chemist. He gets paid a retainer, a share of any profits, and access to the company’s supply of chemicals and facilities for his experiments. In exchange, he’s responsible for ensuring the processes work, the staff he trains are capable of doing the work they are paid for, and,” Tracy paused dramatically, “the company owns anything he develops on company time, or using company facilities or chemicals.”

“Nasty.” Belle licked her lips in anticipation. “Can you enforce that last condition?”

“Herr Hardegg of the law firm of Hardegg, Selfisch, and Krapp seems to think so. He doesn’t expect any problems dealing with Dr. Phil. He did, however, suggest that Dr. Phil have a large share of the company. Something like fifty percent. Although he did agree that forty-nine percent would do.”

“Are you saying your Dr. Phil is worth twenty thousand dollars, Tracy?” Erin asked.

“I think so. Certainly there’s nobody else offering to make baking soda. You do realize that there’s a potentially big market out there, and whoever gets in first could dominate the market? I just think we should get in first.”

“That recipe Amy got. You think someone else could get one?” a thoughtful Tasha asked.

“Yes,” replied Tracy. “And there are plenty of bright people in Grantville capable of following the recipe. However, if we get in fast we can lock in a lot of the local suppliers of urine. That’s where some of the start-up capital will go. We also need an ice-making machine — something that will work in Jena.”