Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (8 page)

“Wow. You’re good with people.”

“I listen. Nadia is the only woman Park talks to, and Crandall is gone.”

“That leaves Sojiro, Toby, and the dumb
blond to spread around four single girls.”

“Um . . . Sojiro is gay, so just
two guys. You don’t like Lou?”

“He can’t even do square roots in
his head.”

“Not every genius is hard science. How
many languages do you speak?”

“English and enough German to read
technical papers.” Mercy didn’t count Portuguese.

“Lou speaks seven languages, and I
hear he’s very clever with his tongue.”

“What good is that?”

“Piloting is his passion, but he
makes most of his salary reading foreign newspapers for British Military Intelligence
and doing analysis. Sometimes he just talks to people in bars, and they tell
him things we need to know.”

“Well, even if he’s James Bond, he’s
dating someone earthside.”

Yuki smiled enigmatically. “I know
his type. If this takes more than a week, or we’re all going to die in a
disaster, he’ll sleep with someone here.”

“Ew. You’re welcome to him. From
what I’ve heard, he’s probably carrying a few strains of VD.”

“Not after our alien scrub-down. You
and I are kind of outsiders in this club; we should stick together. Tell you
what: I’ll stay clear of Toby so you can rope him in.”

“How can you stand to be near Lou
after the way he treated you? He’s not what I’d call Mr. Right.”

“Sometimes all you need is Mr.
Right Now,” Yuki asserted.

Mercy blushed. “Maybe one of the
big doors leads to a second level.”

Yuki shook her head. “There were
enough straps for almost thirty people, but the decontamination room had
eighty-one pods. I’m guessing that the aliens don’t want all of us to stay in
the command center.”

“Maybe. I know that the hardest
part of designing spacecraft for me, other than minimizing weight, is packing
enough food and water for everyone for the month.”

Yuki glanced out the clear window. “So
everyone not on duty goes camping in the woods? Add that to our list of
questions for the alien.”

The two approached the larger of
the two gold doors. Nothing happened when they touched it with their bare
hands. After five minutes of talking and searching for other triggers, Yuki raised
her hands in surrender. “No admittance. Is this the forbidden tree in Paradise? Or do you think this Sensei is hiding in there?”

Mercy shrugged. “Could be the
luggage claim.”

“Why is it that the alien only
talks to Red?”

“The alien talked to both her
parents. Mira’s special.”

“You grew up with her. You must
know something.”

Mercy bounced to the far side, the
final door. A triple-touch caused the rectangular door to fold lensward,
letting in bright light and a gentle breeze. Beyond the door was an arc of
patio about five meters deep, made of pale-blue tiles. The tiles were
proportioned like dominoes a meter long.
No, narrower at one end; they
resemble daisy petals.
Except for a narrow band on each side of the windows
around the rim, the outside of the ship was plastered with the tiles as well. The
same tiles were also used to fashion a picket fence and a pergola overhead.
However, there was a slight gap in the fence near both the left and right edges
of the patio.

Both women stepped outside to take a
better look.

“This walkway circles the whole
ship like a boardwalk,” Mercy announced.

Her Asian companion strode to the
edge of the patio. “The mountain has a stream cascading down the side.”

Mercy stood on the same plank to
gaze at the scenery. “It’s gorgeous.”

“That looks like a road winding
down beside the waterfall.”

As she glanced down, Mercy noticed
a round spot on the top of the nearest rail that was a slightly different
color. Squeezing from both sides, she pressed it like a button. The rail went
dark and came out of the formation like a pulled tooth. “This is amazing.
Antigravity planks. I can turn them off.”

One set of giant space windows
closed and the next opened, and the resulting temperature shift caused a surge
in the wind. In the weak gravity, the breeze pushed Mercy toward the gap,
paralyzed in panic.

Yuki grabbed the engineer’s sticky
belt with both hands and planted her feet against the rails to either side,
anchoring them both. “Turn. It. Back. On.”

Mercy clicked the spot on her plank
again, and the device rang with a vibration similar to a tuning fork. This
locked the rail in place half a meter higher than it had been before. “Good
idea.” She stepped away from the edge, and the pair retreated to the safety of
the control room archway. “That’s twice you’ve saved me with your athletic
skills.”

“It was nothing.”

The engineer raised an eyebrow in
reply.

“I’ve had some acrobatics
experience when I was younger: tumbling, circus trapeze, and rope work. Zero-g
seemed to be a natural extension.”

“You’re good.”                                                                                                               

“Please don’t tell anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Men line up when they hear about
that kind of flexibility. Women automatically hate me. I don’t need to give
them any more reasons.”

“Sure. How much more time do we have?”

Blinking again, Yuki said, “About
an hour.”

“Should I experiment more with the
planks?”

“No. Let’s get a look at the entire
ship before we destroy it. Are these really antigravity devices?”

“They behave more like levitating
superconductors with quantum-position locking.”

“Levitating? You’re just making
this stuff up.”

“No. I’d never BS you.
Superconductors can float in one spot or hover around a circular track. They
can lift up thousands of times their own weight. Sonrisa could tell you. Our
labs are still perfecting them because they require extreme cold and purity of
materials.”

They skirted the saucer. At the
widest, it was about twenty-five meters.

“How many hectares of surface area
does this bubble have?” Yuki asked.

“About 1,256—six times the land
area of Monaco, but about a fifth the size of Manhattan. I’m not sure if the
surface directly lensward from here is usable. When I was recovering from my
fall, all I could see was fog.”

“Back up. Why would you know the
land area of those cities?”

“A theoretical project I consulted
on, to see if we could boost whole existing cities into orbit with Icarus
technology.”

“Did Red come up with that one,
too?”

“No, James Blish did. He’s a
science-fiction author—you’d know him as one of the writers for the original
Star
Trek
.”

“Never watched it. How did the
experiment work?”

“Not structurally feasible,
especially the plastic pipes—too brittle and temperature sensitive. Plus, the
sustainability equations break down when we have over a few thousand people per
bubble.”

“Did you grow up in a lab or
something?”

“Whenever I could. Not only did Dad
have the best toys, but it was the only way I could spend time with either one
of my parents during the summer. Did you grow up in a circus?”

“They took me as an apprentice. I worked
very long hours.”

“Sounds difficult.”

“When you’re really poor, you need
to be the best at something to survive. My father became a barker; he would
gather the crowds and collect their money. I eventually achieved my dream of
having my name on the marquee.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I’m small because I didn’t get
enough to eat growing up. Mori-san gave me a scholarship to the best schools. Today,
my hazard pay is enough to support my entire family.”

When they reached the far side of
the ship, the windows to the forbidden room were opaque, and the window setting
couldn’t be changed from the outside. Mercy noted, “There are no other
entrances to the room we want, but I can tell that the saucer is attached near
the neck of the balloon.”

“How did you know where to press on
that device?” Yuki asked. “The planks are all the same shade of pale gray to
me.”

“I can distinguish a wider range of
blues than other people, nothing major.”

Yuki didn’t believe her either.
“Give me a boost. I’ll climb onto the pergola roof and see if there are any
doors or other clues up above.”

“That’s too dangerous.”

“I’m not afraid of a fall.”

“If there’s no gravity in the
middle of the sphere, you could get stuck there. We don’t have a kilometer-long
rope or a way to catch you. You’d starve to death. Worse, there might not be
air beyond the grav zones.”

“There has to be a way we can make
exploration safer. Come on.”

Mercy considered the challenge. “If
I were designing these panels, there’d be a remote control. I could turn the pergola
planks sideways and you could walk on them like this deck. You could climb up
there if I make some planks into steps. We can string extra straps to make the
ascent easier.”

They continued around the ship as
Mercy mused about other shapes she’d make with the dominoes. “The possibilities
are limitless as long as we stay within a certain distance of the saucer. The
five-meter-thick umbilical that links us to the ground looks like the same
material as the saucer. Maybe the dominoes will hover around that, too. There
are about two thousand panels from what I can see. If I were a betting woman, I’d
say 2,187 because it’s the nearest power of three.”

“A control panel like you’re
describing might also appear in colors that only you can see.”

“Stands to reason.”

“Let’s poke around and see if we
can locate something like that.”

There were no invisible blue
markings, and nothing turned on when they tapped around all sides of the big door
between the command center and the patio. Instead, Mercy had to arrange the dominoes
manually. When set, each held more than 130 kilograms, the weight of both women
plus another board.

“You over-engineered the steps a
bit,” Yuki complained.

“Your safety is worth a little
extra effort.”

“Apart from building a stair you
could march a blind elephant up, you’ve only flipped about twenty meters of
roof planks. The next decontaminees should be arriving in five minutes.”

“Shoot, we need to be there to help!”
Mercy said, rushing down her staircase into the control area.

Yuki leaned over the edge to shout,
“I’ll be down in a minute. I want to make a little more progress.”

Auckland arrived a few minutes
early, and Mercy was up to her elbows in goop. When she called for her fellow
scout over the radio, Yuki’s response was, “Busy. Later.”

Yuki honestly liked Mercy, but she had work to do. Once
Mercy was preoccupied, the technician’s first order of business was to plant a listening
dot in each room of the ship, plus the patio—that was all but one of the twelve
miniature devices she’d brought with her. What she wouldn’t give for the cameras
she had hidden in the rest of her gear.

Tuning her headset to the first
bug, she could hear the first person was done coughing up a lung and could
croak questions—Auckland. Since the doctor would need to help with the others,
and the bug would give her advance warning about people leaving the showers,
Yuki decided to make a quick run around outside on top of the pergola level.
When that failed to turn up anything, she wrapped sticky strips up to her elbows
and knees and strung together a safety line about six meters long to attach to
her waist. Then she went climbing in ways that mousy Mercy would never approve,
which is why she had to do it before they could stop her.

While leaning over the edge, Yuki
had an idea. What if the locked room had an access hatch outside? Such a hatch
would be hidden from view by the gray panels. Whenever Mercy had asked for
another panel, Yuki had deactivated the panels around the forbidden room and
carried them to the engineer by the armload. Nothing appeared above the
boardwalk, but she still needed to check below.

Yuki started the covert operation
by closing the large, golden entrance. Nothing was audible or visible through
this barrier. Free-climbing to the area beneath her target, she removed tiles
in a diagonal swath. Locating the off switch was tricky, and when the tile she
was clinging to disengaged, she swung completely upside-down, hanging by her
ankles and knees. It was in this awkward position that Mercy contacted her.

“Busy. Later,” was all Yuki could
squeeze out.

She had to strap each plank to her
back and carry them back to the boardwalk one at a time, worrying that the
activation tone might give her away. On her third attempt, she found the seam.
Panicked by her success, she covered the crack back up, as well as the other
holes. Pressing a plank into a snug slot against the hull muffled the
activation sound enough that she grew bolder. Removing and replacing tiles one
at a time, she followed the seam around. The hatch took up most of the room’s
underside, almost like a landing ramp she’d seen on military craft.

What else were the aliens hiding? She
needed to give Mori an edge when the crew returned to Earth. From her bug, she
discovered that Commander Zeiss was the next person out of the soup, but he
wasn’t talking. Something had happened to him that Auckland was refusing to
discuss yet. He muttered something like, “Maybe the mu shielding will help him.
People will be arriving at about four-minute intervals over the next hour.”

“It takes about ten minutes to
shake off the effects enough to clean on your own,” Mercy noted.

“Once we have five more recovered
team members, one per tube, you can go after Yuki. She’s obviously not hurt.”

That gave Yuki another twenty
minutes of freedom, maybe more if Zeiss didn’t snap out of it. She climbed to
the top of the saucer, near the five-meter-wide umbilical where the tiles
stopped. She couldn’t decipher how the ship was coupled, but the tube was piping
something to the saucer—air? Water? Certainly the pods were transferred from
the lens area through this conduit. If the showers occupied the center, there
was still a great deal of dead space on this level unaccounted for.

When she stretched her hand out to
touch the umbilical, static crackled and stung her fingers. More miniature
lightning cascaded lensward, glowing through the fog. No further probes in that
direction.

She needed to crab-walk over to the
region of the shower area they couldn’t access, which was coincidentally the
same spot as the dining commons. Unfortunately, the desired region was just beyond
the reach of her tether. Yuki could descend, move the safety line, and reascend
. . . or she could risk it for a few minutes. Time was short, so she peeled off
her leash and scrambled over to the target. This was no riskier than running a
roofline during a burglary.

She was expert enough that she
could peek under the tiles without difficulty. The fifth tile she checked, near
the pergola, concealed a gold circle, half a meter across. Placing the
deactivated plank on her back, Yuki rolled her fingers like a safecracker. This
was going to make her rich, a hero in the extended family. When she
triple-tapped the seal, water shot out like a fire hydrant, first soaking her
and then knocking her off the roof. Evidently, sticky fabric didn’t work in
water.
Hoorah, I was the first genius to figure that out.

If she hadn’t remembered the plank
strapped to her back, she might have died the way Mercy warned. Instinctively,
she grabbed the activation dot on her board and squeezed. The vibration through
her spine soothed her like a flannel blanket did her niece. She froze in the
ship’s orbit three meters from the nearest railing. Water was still gushing
out, soaking the front entrance and dribbling through the cracks.

She had to fix this before anyone
came to investigate. Unwinding every scrap of fabric from her elbows and knees,
she managed to cobble together about four meters of new tether. Since her
headset was the only available weight, she tied it onto the end of the lasso. Then
she played cowgirl for several minutes before she established a sufficient
anchor. Praying to her ancestors, she turned off her plank and fell. Even with
low gravity, the impact hurt, but she splayed herself wide to stick. Her left
side rebounded because the clear windows wouldn’t adhere to the fabric.
However, her right side absorbed the strain with only a little twisting.

As she climbed, Yuki could hear
Mercy’s voice through the headset strapped to the rail. Moving as fast as
possible, she regained the main deck. A shift in the wind sprayed her with more
water. Cursing, she crawled up Mercy’s stairs and tapped the spigot shut. On
the way down, she slipped in a puddle, only to be saved by the ‘unnecessary’ railing.

As Yuki staggered into the control
room, blowing hair out of her face, Mercy was launching herself out of the
shower area in a panic. Yuki untied the end of her dragging tether and put the
headset back on. “Sorry,” she said. “I was on my way back to dry off.”

“Are you okay?” Mercy demanded,
taking Yuki’s arm to help support and prevent float-off.

“Yes. But be careful: keep the
fabric out of the shower area. If it gets wet, it’s useless. That’s why the
aliens kept them at the entrance.”

“What happened?”

“I found the garden hose. Or maybe
it’s for emergency refills.”

“Tell Rachael; she’s the expert on
that.”

Her breathing still ragged from the
adventure, Yuki said to her newest friend, “If I ever complain about your being
too overprotective again, tell me I’m all wet. Use those words.”

“Let’s get you dried off again, and
then you can brief the others.”

“Yeah, that works,” Yuki said,
limping a little on her right ankle. She’d need to wrap the ankle with the
cling fabric like a compression bandage.

****

Yuki escorted the first wave of
people to the control room and showed them the ropes—or fabrics, in this case.
She demonstrated tapping a second window so more unfiltered light poured in.

As she recited everything she and
the engineer had discovered, Auckland said, “You’re the best tour guide I’ve
ever had.”

Rachael was the most vocal in her
appreciation of the ship. “Take out 100 hectares for windows, 100 for engines,
and maybe half for water storage.”

“Mercy said it’s only five-twelfths.”

“We still have enough to sustain sixty
people indefinitely at our tech level.”

“How many people could the command
saucer support?” asked Yuki.

The life-support specialist
shrugged. “With perfect filtration and reclamation of evaporation, between five
and ten people for . . . twenty years. But we’d have to keep the big exit hatch
sealed and find a source of food. Why is water dripping from the top of the
door?”

Yuki smiled and explained, “I
accidentally discovered a faucet while extending the top deck.”

“Mop up what you can,” Rachael
encouraged everyone. “Take it down to the showers for recycling.”

“Remember, don’t get the sticky
straps wet!” Yuki called out.

The men used T-shirts to absorb the
vital liquid from patio planks.

Yuki enjoyed the display of man-flesh.
For scientists, a couple of them were ripped.

The life-support expert glowered
both at the waste of water and the ogling of a married friend. Yuki thought,
Funny,
you didn’t complain when everyone stared at me stripped down.

Aloud, Yuki said, “Keep one of
these boards on your back whenever you step outside.” She showed the others how
to activate an anchor board in an emergency. As she went back for the next
group, Zeiss played with the planks like a kid with Tinkertoys.

Once Red emerged, Mercy led the
pilot to her husband immediately. On the way through, Mercy asked, “Why is that
light flashing?”

“What light?” several other people
asked. Mercy pointed to a panel by the outer door.

“I think we found our remote
control for the hover planks,” Yuki said. “If only we had a marker to label it.
Too bad we can’t get into storage.”

Auckland said, “Maybe the passage
to the decontamination room was open, and both doors can’t be open at once.
Aliens are really worried about viruses contaminating things. Let’s close the
outside door and try again.”

Yuki herded everyone, and Mercy
tapped the final door—nothing. “What does the Wizard of Oz say?” asked Yuki.

Red blinked. “Sensei isn’t
answering on this side.”

Zeiss whispered, “Maybe you’re the
key for this door, too.” He was staring at the bare ankle his wife, Red, had
wrapped with sticky strap. The faintest edge of a tattoo peeked above the
strip.

Stepping to the front of the crowd,
Red tapped open the locked room and gasped when it opened.

All their cargo had been dumped
into heaps by an anal-retentive hurricane. The crates themselves had been
disassembled and stacked neatly in a corner. All clothes were in one pile,
while seeds were heaped by type. Nothing was in the original container, with
the possible exception of meal packets, medicine, and toothpaste that had been
hermetically sealed.

“Is everything here?” Mercy asked.

Rachael shook her head. “It’ll take
days to catalogue everything, but the guns and explosives are missing for
certain.”

“Confiscated for our safety or
Sensei’s?” asked Yuki.

Red shook her head. “This is new
territory for me. Maybe Sojiro can help—he’s the expert on alien interfaces.
Perhaps Sensei is waiting for everyone to arrive. Either way, now would be a
good time to put on some clothes.”

Everyone dressed again and reassembled
the crates. Mercy’s black sports tank top clung a little too much like a
swimsuit, so she put on her favorite lab coat to cover up.

Cargo was sorted into bedrooms:
agriculture, construction, occupational equipment, space gear, and personal. Red
labeled each portal with white first-aid tape. The only dispute was when Mercy
suggested the ‘p’ and ‘s’ rooms be switched to make the order alphabetical.

“No time,” Red countered. “We have
to empty the storage area before the outside door can be unlocked again.”

Mercy grumbled and returned to
shower duty. Everyone agreed that, with three younger siblings, she had the
best bedside manner.

Yuki repeated her spiel with the next
group as Pratibha recorded her on the high-speed digital camera with solar-recharge
capabilities. She would be immortalized when they returned.

****

After everyone was through
decontamination, they held a brief ceremony, dumping founder Elias Fortune’s
ashes over the balcony. The man had been like a grandfather to Red, and he had
dreamed of visiting the artifact. Unfortunately, the neurological degradation
caused by the pages had acted faster than bureaucracy. “In spite of ourselves,
our race made it,” Red announced. “I only wish Uncle Daniel could have seen
this.”

Yuki took a photo from high above
with a prototype Mori camera. She captured the panorama and the panels, with
crew members to provide scale. The time and date appeared in the lower left,
and she added the caption, ‘Ceremony inside alien biosphere.’ Praying, she hit
the send button. Ejecting the spent cartridge, she inserted another. At over a
million dollars each, she only had a couple more photos.

Zeiss, who had recovered
significantly during his playtime, pulled out a bottle of contraband Mountain
Dew. “To Daniel Fortune.” He took a sip and passed it to Herk.

“For Crandall. I hope he survived,”
said Herk who treated the swig like aged whiskey.

Yvette complained, “That drink has
bromated vegetable oil; it’s awful for you. It can lead to schizophrenia in
Actives.”

Yuki replied, “Take the stick out.
This is a celebration.” She snatched the bottle from the security expert and
swilled some down. It was warm, caustic, and made her cough. “Skoal.” She passed
it to Red.

“For all our friends and loved ones
who couldn’t be here anymore,” Red declared, sipping pensively.

Tears in her eyes, Yvette accepted
the bottle next. “For Brazil, L1, and possibly moon base.” This toast triggered
a renewed outburst from Risa.

“What are they talking about?”
asked Mercy.

Most of the men in the group looked
away, unwilling to revisit their own emotions on the subject.

“Sit down,” Yvette said. Gently, she
told Mercy about the deaths, including her family. The woman who’d been so kind
to everyone else was gripping a wall strap, shuddering. Her eyes were wide, but
she couldn’t cry, no matter how many strangled sounds she made.