Warp Thrive
Thrive Space Colony Adventures Box Set Books 4-6
Ginger Booth
Copyright © 2020 Ginger Booth
All rights reserved.
Cover by Raphael Francavilla and Ginger Booth
Skyship image © Freestyleimages | Dreamstime.com
Diagrams by Ginger Booth
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Prologue
Part I
Maps
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part II
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Part III
Map
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Afterword
Author’s Note
Also by Ginger Booth
Prologue
Launched on a shoestring,
The colonists were humanity’s only hope for survival.
But they’re failing in the Aloha star system.
Denali holds two prizes of inestimable value.
A true starship at the bottom of the ocean.
And the greatest nanite scientist in the system.
Part I
Starship Thrive
Maps
Thrive floorplan.
1
Captain Sass Collier eagerly stabbed her comms button the moment her ship set down their containers, her hand trembling from the strain of the past few hours. “Waterfalls, this is Thrive. We’re down!”
Her gunner Ben Acosta shot down yet another pseudo-pterodactyl – pterry for short. “And we’re ever so eager for interdiction,” he muttered.
Poor Ben. He’d never seen wild animals before. He hated having to kill them.
“Thrive, your sonics are live – now,” Zan replied, spokesman for their new hosts here at the domed habitat of Waterfalls. Or at least, Zan led the hunters who held the hostile wildlife perimeter, while Thrive carved itself a parking lot in the riotous jungle. “Remember, do not fly your ship through the sonics. You won’t enjoy it. You’d probably pass out and crash your ship into a dome, killing thousands.”
Worth avoiding, Sass conceded. “Understood, Waterfalls.”
Though Sass was pretty sure she didn’t understand much about how things worked on the planet Denali. They just got here.
She kept the ship hovering to see how effective these ‘sonics’ were. They did seem to keep the monsters on the periphery at bay. But while they were still maneuvering, Zan needed to keep the overhead barrier turned off. He told her to let him know as soon as she was ready to stay below 100 meters. That was an hour ago.
Their hectare of infant spaceport still steamed from Sass burning off the forest, and Ben’s attempts to carve rock and level the site. This wasn’t entirely possible. But their 100 x 100 meter foothold on a new planet now featured one step broad and level enough to park their 4 shipping containers, and a larger shelf for the ship, itself 45 meters long. If the rest of the site was rough sloping ground, well, Ben had performed near-miracles for such quick work.
A pterry dropped to the ground right where Sass intended to park. The beast lay there, one 5-meter wing extended, the other curled to its body, wracked with seizures.
“Aw…” Ben moaned beside her.
“Sorry, Ben,” she murmured. She danced the Thrive, flying on-end like a dolphin prancing on water with its tail f
lukes, to direct her engine output to incinerate the still-twitching monster. The engines were giving all they had just to keep Thrive in the air in this unfamiliar 1.1 g gravity well. She couldn’t even fly the ship level as they would back home among the low-gravity moons and rings of the gas giant Pono. Back where we belong, she tried not to think.
She cremated one more twitching fallen pterry with one of the high-power rock guns, and sat back a moment. Well, certainly none of the approaching monsters were healthy anymore. However, using a landscaping laser on a piece of empty ground was one thing. If a pterry carcass landed on the ship or their precious cargo, she couldn’t very well blast it to cinders in situ.
She inquired, “Waterfalls, do these birds ever recover after passing through the sonic barrier?”
“Not very often,” Zan replied over the comms.
“Meaning? Like, once a year they destroy a dome?”
“Oh, no! Hunters can shoot them down, of course. But normally they’re eager to escape. They fly straight back into the sonics. Over and over again until they die. So, problem solved. The sonics are effective. You can set down anytime now. Will that be soon?” Zan and his crew had been covering their arrival from the jungle for hours, plus whatever time it took them to install the beacons and erect the sonic barriers.
“Probably. Thrive out.” She turned first to Ben, then consulted her first mate Abel and engineer Copeland in the hold. Nerves jangling with adrenaline from the hell-ride down from orbit, and battling the wildlife, she should be eager to simply set the ship down and be done with it.
Except she wasn’t sure the Thrive would ever lift again.
Ben drew a quick diagram on the display between them. “Park there. Captain, the fueling crew is exhausted.” The youth, just turned 21 on the voyage here, offered a compassionate sad smile. He understood her reluctance.
“Right. Let’s do this.” She danced her dolphin to one end of Ben’s suggested bed, sort of diagonal on the lower end of the lot. She swiveled so the landing struts pointed somewhat downward, and cut in their bottom thrusters to maximum while she lowered the engines within a few meters of the fused rock and soil below. She’d burn a pool of lava beneath them if she kept this up. She eased off the power to the engines and –
THWACK! The ship bounced forward onto its landing struts. No amount of inertial dampeners or internal gravity could cancel out that sudden lurch to the ground. “I hope I didn’t break anything.”
Ben’s chuckle beside her held only a tinge of hysteria at first. In a moment, they both cracked up, Sass with tears squeezing out of her eyes.
As they calmed down, she realized she was not engendering confidence. She sighed. “I apologize, Mr. Acosta. That was unprofessional of me. Too much adrenaline.”
He shrugged, and continued on to stretch his neck. Like hers, it was probably in knots from the hours-long battle to land safely. “With respect, Sass, you’re the only captain I’ve ever known. And I felt the same way.” He leaned forward and turned the external flood lights onto the polar winter night. One quadrant remained dark, its lamp likely a pterodactyl casualty.
They hadn’t exactly been flying blind. But the blinding chaotic lights of out-gassing engine and rock-cutting laser, during frenetic maneuvers, hardly provided a calm, reasoned view of their new surroundings. The impenetrable forest loomed 30 meters high downslope and like a wall into darkness upslope. Greens dominated, in every imaginable shade. But even in the forest canopy, strong elements of red, purple, and white suggested whole trees of those mingled colors. Small splotches of further brilliant colors burst out of the undergrowth. Their new pocket spaceport, blackened browns, steamed in the rain from their efforts to cauterize it.
“Thrive, Waterfalls,” Zan interrupted her marveling gaze. “Please turn the lights off. They agitate the wildlife.”
“Oh! Sorry.”
Ben doused the lights for her.
“No worries,” Zan assured her. “But the selectmen are expecting you this afternoon. Is that still the plan? We should go soon. The bio-locks will take a few hours, to enter the dome. Can we fetch you in half an hour?”
“Yes. Thank you. I’ll get my team together.” She signed off. “Ben, you’re on break.”
As the final act of their grueling landing festivities, the ship’s engineer John Copeland cut power to Thrive’s gravity. He shuffled aching feet as he settled in to weigh 10% extra for the foreseeable future.
Denali’s strong gravity wasn’t a new sensation. He worked out under 1.1 g, though not 1.2 g like the others. Copeland wasn’t a fully stretched-out sort of Mahina settler. But he’d let himself grow rangy as a teenager to fit in better with his peers, maybe 10-15 cm taller than he might have been. He had the weakest bones of the crew, but he sheathed them in muscle to compensate.
He pumped up the ship’s internal pressure to match Denali’s, and he was done. Or rather, his work was never done. An endless stream of tasks awaited, starting with the fact that his engine room was full of fuel drums, most of them spent.
But he could take a break.
He flipped his podium-like display to the cameras and panned around to survey their tiny domain. Those trees looked nothing like the aspen and spruce of Mahina, nor the fruit trees Sass kept on board. The collage of colors and strange shapes defied his ability to interpret it. Now that they were on the ground, the sonic boundaries seemed effective at keeping the monsters at bay, though they prowled along the perimeter. Unfortunately, the flyers tended to get zapped and fall through, twitching.
“Hey, still working?” Ben asked, arriving to join him.
Cope threw his arms around his room-mate and hugged him close, overcome for a moment. He never fully believed they’d survive a landing. Their margin for error was that close. But Ben was OK. The ship still held air. Its life support systems remained online. And that was a rego miracle.
Abel quipped from his bench beneath the scrubber trees, “Public displays of affection now?”
Copeland hastily stepped back from his clutch, and shot a glower at the first mate. “Thought he might hold me upright. But he’s beat. Great job, buddy.”
Ben nodded a wry smile. “You too. Three. Everyone down here. Hell of a ride. So we’re headed into town? Drinks with the locals? Abel, you’re buying!”
The last thing Cope wanted was to exit the ship and walk into that midnight zoo of horrors. “Sure we don’t want to rest up? Hit the town tomorrow fresh.”
“Spoilsport!” Ben scoffed. “C’mon, it’ll be fun!”
Abel warned, “The locals expect an official meet and greet today.”
“They do indeed,” Sass called out, trotting down the stairs from the catwalk. “Abel, you’ve got the ship. You keep Ben. And fix that ankle of yours.” The first mate sprained it while helping untangle a snafu in the fueling operation on the way in.
Sass continued, “Copeland, you’re with me.” She cast him a bracing smile.
“Me!”
Sass nodded. “You. Eli. Clay and me. We’ll kick up our feet in this ‘bio-lock’ and relax for a couple hours.” She paused to digest his consternation. “Weren’t you just discussing that with the guys?”
“Uh, yeah.” He was trying to talk them out of it.
“Jules!” Abel called up to the galley. “Fix the captain a picnic, would you? Send along a few ice wands. For hosting gifts.”
2
For Eli Rasmussen, Ph.D., terraforming botanist, Denali was love at first sight. An entire planet, richly covered 100 meters deep in strange plants. Actual living rain poured from the sky. He tipped his faceplate back and marveled as the runnels streamed across.
Copeland suddenly grabbed his elbow, as Eli’s next footfall stretched 10 cm lower than he was expecting. Ben had done a heroic job clearing the terraces for their tiny new pocket spaceport, but the footing was treacherous between shelves. Irritated, Eli planned out his next half dozen steps, then lifted his eyes to the trees again.