Senescence (Jezebel's Ladder Book 5) (2 page)

After almost twenty years of absence, the starship
Sanctuary
emerged into normal space above the permanent hexagon shape at Saturn’s North
Pole. The nexus provided easy access under Einstein’s rubber sheet to subspace,
where normal limits on velocity didn’t apply.

“God, it feels good to be back
home,” said the real Mira Hollis. She lay on one of three control couches
connected to the ship’s snowflake-shaped interface. With her head under one of
the central helmets, she could see 3D representations of the ship’s route and
the large gravity wells nearby. “I’ve placed us in an orbit just inside the A
ring.”

From the closest couch, her
husband, Commander Zeiss, said, “Our repairs to the landing bay lens opening
are holding. No heat emissions. Excellent. To anyone watching on gravity
sensors, we’ll look like a chunk of ice that the innermost moon knocked loose.”
Hours ago, he had ordered radio silence. Half the crew members were suited up
in the landing bay, ready to take any number of emergency actions. “Now it’s
time for Mr. Llewellyn’s final exam.” As a former Math instructor, Zeiss loved
tests and puzzles.

The eighteen-year-old co-pilot,
Stewart Llewellyn, occupied the third control couch. His star-drive and gravity
senses, plus the orbital computation skills he had inherited from his parents, Mercy
and Kai, meant that Stu had been born to fly starships. In spite of these
advantages, he had completed the same astronaut training as the rest of the
crew. All of the crew members had coached him in some aspect of his duties,
each convinced that his or her advice would keep him alive someday.

Mira was proud to see him wearing
his father’s old flight suit, but she would always think of him as the
adorable, curly-haired toddler she had babysat. Now that the mission was over, she
might finally be able to have some children of her own.

Eyes closed, Stu concentrated his
special senses on the space surrounding the ship.
“I see a station in
geosynchronous orbit near the nexus. Five smaller objects are drifting within
laser range of its dock.” Stu relayed object coordinates and masses through
Snowflake’s virtual model. With a ghost of his father’s British accent, he
asked, “Sir, shall I open the lens a hair and check for signals?”

Zeiss sat up, disconnecting from
the Snowflake headset. “Negative. Stay dark.”

Mira agreed with the decision. Their
departure from the Solar System had been controversial. Their return might not
be entirely welcome.

“Plot an intercept for the station,”
Zeiss ordered. As navigator, her husband would normally do this himself, but
they had agreed to grill Stu on the hot seat for a while. “We can use the
station’s long-range radio to negotiate our return with the UN Space Agency.” On
Labyrinth, an inhabited moon in hard-to-reach Oblivion system, most of the
ship’s communication gear had been lost.

She added, “Make that course within
a kilometer of the station so I can scan it.” On Mira’s own, she could detect
intent and Page talents within fifty meters. Linked to her husband through the
Collective Unconscious, she could detect human life on the other side of the
biosphere. “Use a light touch. I don’t want you to spill my coffee, let alone
the lakes.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

Minutes later, he disconnected from
the Snowflake headgear and presented his solution on the saucer-shaped control
room’s overhead bubble.

Mira double-checked the heading. The
course was smoother than silk, but the rationale behind an answer was
important, too. “Thirteen hours to intercept? That seems longer than usual.”

“The commander wanted us to drift
in like an ice chunk,” Stu explained. “Besides, less fuel spent now means more
options later.”

“You just earned your wings!” Mira
gave Stu a congratulatory hug, but he pulled away quickly and averted his eyes.
With her talent, she could feel his stomach flutter.
Guilt?

“I’ll tell the others in the
habitat,” Stu stammered. Abruptly, he bounced through the zero-g room toward the
exit.

When the boy was gone, Mira turned
to her husband. “What’s with him?”

Zeiss smiled. “He didn’t want me to
get jealous.”

“Why would you?”

“Stu had a bit of a crush on you
when he was sixteen.”

“Stu? I changed his diapers!”

Her husband wrapped an arm around
her waist. He was so gentle that sometimes she forgot how tall he was. With his
last pod treatment, the touches of gray in his hair had darkened back to his original
blond. “Well, with your energy and the time you spent in stasis, you could pass
for twenty-five.” He demonstrated her desirability with a kiss. “You
are
closest to his age.”

“What about Joan? She’s thirteen.”

“Stu treats her as an annoying
little sister. Besides, she doesn’t even have breasts yet. With her Magi
genetic modifications, Joan might never develop human sexual traits.” She had
been spliced with alien DNA in utero in what was supposed to be therapy to ease
complications of the pregnancy.

Mira frowned. “When you put it like
that, Stu must be pretty lonely. The rest of us have been paired up since the
beginning. For us, returning to Earth is about professional redemption. For
Stu, it’s a chance to find a match of his own.”

****

“Twenty klicks,” Mira said as the ship drifted to the
designated mark. She could barely contain her excitement. Within minutes, they might
reestablish radio contact with the UN Space Agency. She already had the cake
and punch set out in the low-g dining commons.

“Open the landing-bay lens just
enough for signals to pass,” Zeiss ordered Snowflake.

Stu sat on the edge of the pilot couch,
sharing all relevant meters and images on the wall. Everyone except the shuttle
crew crowded into the control room to watch, wearing spacesuits according to
regulations. Although, bulky helmets and gloves hung nearby.

Oleander, Joan’s tall Nordic
mother, checked the communications board. “Receiving the automated docking
signal from the station. No chatter. Transponders on three other objects identify
them as deep-space radio telescopes.”

“Warm up the weapon,” Zeiss ordered
over the shuttle’s umbilical cable. He still refused to break radio silence.

The shuttle crew turned the two authorization
keys on the craft’s powerful chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL). After the
initiation sequence, Yuki reported, “Weapon armed.” The Japanese electronics
expert had been selected to head the shuttle mission. Not only had she been the
narrator of the videos sent to Earth after they landed on
Sanctuary
, but
everyone knew she hadn’t taken part in the theft of the shuttle. Both facts should
generate goodwill during the negotiations to come.

“Snowflake, dial the lens open just
wide enough to check thermal imaging.”

Mira watched through the interface
because
Sanctuary
wasn’t close enough for her to use her special
abilities. “No activity on the station. No heat or light signatures. It looks
mothballed. The other two objects appear to be empty fuel tanks. Should we send
the shuttle to investigate?”

Zeiss shook his head. “No.
Something doesn’t feel right. The station airlock could be booby-trapped, or the
controls could be encrypted with software we can’t crack.”

As the veteran with the most
deep-space experience, Oleander said, “The radio telescope array could be used
to send a message to Earth. If we send
Ascension
to patch into the array
hardware directly, Yuki will have less security to overcome.”

Stu steered the huge ship toward
the telescope with the elegance of a Strauss waltz.

“Hold
at one kilometer distance,” Zeiss ordered from his control couch. “Status of
Ascension
team?”

“Shuttle
ready,” Yuki reported from
Ascension’s
cockpit.

“Dock
ready,” Risa echoed from the landing bay. Her husband, Herk, would be riding on
the shuttle in case they needed his exoskeleton strength or the cutting torches
on his combat armor.

Through
the Collective Unconscious and her Empathy, Mira could sense the mental flames
of all six shuttle astronauts. The strength and colors of the shifting aural
lights told her the Page talents and general health of each individual.

Zeiss
said, “Rig for silent running. Keep the station in your COIL sights.”

“Disconnecting
the umbilical,” Yuki replied, separating the shuttle from the starship’s power
and air feeds.

Mira
projected the view from the landing-bay lens onto the overhead bubble. Then she
watched the scene unfold with everyone else. Against the black vastness of
space, small diamonds shimmered in the distance.
Ascension
rose from the
bay with the softest of puffs. The shuttle floated for a full minute before
another short burst angled it toward the communication array.

Stu
whispered, “Telescope two moved.”

“Could
be a coincidence,” Mira said. “The radio telescopes have to perform minor adjustments
to maintain orbit.”

The
moment Zeiss said, “Halfway,” the shuttle fired forward thrusters to counter
momentum.

All
three telescopes opened like carnivorous flowers. The one in the center pivoted
to track
Ascension
. Stu said, “The shuttle has been acquired. The middle
ear is a ringer!”

“Easy,”
Zeiss replied. “The crew will see it, too. Soon, they’ll be able to hide behind
telescope one.”

Yuki’s
voice tore over the airwaves. “Synchrotron radiation buildup!” The COIL pivoted
toward the center telescope and fired. The beam focused on the same spot for
several seconds before the device stopped moving like an ant under the rays of
a magnifying glass. Then a bright flash triggered the solar-flare filter on the
main screen.
One opponent down.

However,
the other telescopes were armed and firing heavy radiation at the shuttle.

“Abort!”
shouted Zeiss.

Ascension
fired main
thrusters to escape the trap as it locked the COIL onto a second telescope.

Mira
said, “Move in. The shuttle needs to get to shelter before—” The fear and panic
of the shuttle crew terminated as their mental flames blew out.
Ascension’s
cockpit exploded.

Everyone
in the command room was too stunned to move.

“We
have to rescue the shuttle,” Mira said. “The feeling is faint, but I know Herk’s
alive.”

Stu
reported, “The second telescope is tumbling toward the planet. The third one—”

A
beam of high energy lanced through the open bay into
Sanctuary
, and the
ship’s intelligence screamed. Snowflake’s displays winked out. Smoke drifted in
from the storage room. Oleander sprang over with a fire extinguisher.

Stu
strapped into his control couch. With no external cameras or sensors responding,
he was the only one who could sense outside the ship. He sounded the collision
alarm.

While
everybody else secured themselves into padded alcoves, Mira warned her friend
to clear the landing bay. “Risa, decontamination.” The shrieks of feedback from
Snowflake forced her to cover her ears.

Bypassing
Snowflake, Stu opened the lens to its fullest and banked
Sanctuary
like
a rollercoaster. The telescope plunged into the bay, snapping off its solar
panels. Once it crashed, the pain in Mira’s head halted.

Mira
said, “Snowflake has a little brain damage, but the systems under the mountain
appear unscathed. Switching to backups.”

Stu
eased the ship’s spin and scanned the skies. When he found no more targets, he said,
“Clear. Permission to scoop
Ascension
, sir.”

Pulling
up the human-made, low-tech, remote cameras, Zeiss said, “Mr. Llewellyn, you
made a mess of my landing bay. If we bring
Ascension
down in this, we
risk tearing it open.”

“We
have to try,” Mira countered. “Seconds count if Herk has a suit breach.”

“Have
Risa shift as much of the rubble as—”

Stu
interrupted. “Sir, the robots that Mom stores near the landing bay can clean
faster.”

“Do
it,” Zeiss agreed, “but don’t recycle any evidence that might tell us who
orchestrated this attack.”

“Yes,
sir.” Stu coaxed the starship controls to gently bring the shuttle home.

Mira
glanced toward the open door to the dining commons. Globules of Welcome Home
cake and red punch floated through the control room as medical personnel raced
for the cargo shaft to reach the landing bay.

The crew reeled from the loss of
Ascension
. Stu hid
their ship from Earth and assessed damage. He handed a summary to the
commander.
“Our gravity generators took a
beating, especially in the landing-bay area. About 8 percent of them are
degraded, but none of them popped.”

Zeiss clapped him on the shoulder.
“At least you spread the effects out. Without your quick thinking, the damage
would have been much more severe.”

“
The generators will take months to repair, and
I’m not sure how
we’ll manage that without Herk,” Stu said, his voice catching on the name.

“I’m worried, too,” Zeiss confided.
“He was the best man at my wedding.”

“Any word from the response team?”
Stu asked.

“The doc should be up soon. The
rest are combing the shuttle wreckage or patching damage to the bay.”

“Sorry. I should have—”

“Stop. You followed orders and
probably earned a commendation,” Zeiss said.

Both fell silent when Dr. Auckland
floated into the room to report. “Herk is still hanging on.” He sounded weary
and grim. “I’ve clamped off and dosed everything I can, but he wouldn’t survive
the thirty hours it would take a decontamination pod to repair him. We’ve
placed him in medical stasis until we can stabilize him. Risa is in shock and
has been relieved of duty until further notice.”

As a pair-bonded couple, Risa
wouldn’t survive long without her husband
.

****

Once the emergencies
were taken care of, Zeiss called a meeting for all remaining crew members in
the dining hall. Stu chose the foot of the table, so he could have the stool
Risa had made for him.

The
couples sat next to their partners along the widest edge of the table, which
now doubled as a giant whiteboard. Still the professor, Zeiss handed out
dry-erase markers for brainstorming.

As
the last in, Nurse Yvette was stuck with the wobbly chair at the head of the
class. She affixed a magnetic coffee cup to the corner. “There are only seven
of us left?”

“Eight,”
Joan corrected, sitting on the counter next to her mother, Oleander. Because of
Joan’s small stature, people forgot she had an adult mind and full voting
rights. She had her father’s wide and stocky build, with legs like bowling
pins, not at all like her willowy, ash-blonde mother. However, their faces and
speech patterns matched.

Zeiss
called the meeting to order. “I’d like to begin with a moment of silence to
honor our friends.”

After
a minute passed, he said, “In addition to our comrades, we’ve lost key
specializations.” Yuki had repaired electronics. Park had been both a pilot and
gravity-drive theorist. Nadia had run power and laser systems. Rachael had
maintained life support. Herk had performed the heavy lifting and dangerous
jobs like head of security. “I know you’re all still in shock, but we need to
focus on our immediate goals if we’re going to survive.”

Zeiss
wrote each item in a separate corner of the board. “Negotiate Amnesty with UN.
Repair Snowflake. Rebuild or Replace Shuttle. Medical Assistance for Herk.” He
drew dependency arrows from Herk and Snowflake to the shuttle.

“How
bad off is the shuttle?” asked Joan.

“We
could fabricate new hull sections and landing gear, but almost every subsystem
in the cockpit has some critical component that should come from the
manufacturer, Fortune Enterprises.” Zeiss inserted Fortune Enterprises into the
flow chart as a prerequisite for the shuttle repairs.

Pratibha,
the doctor’s Indian wife, said, “Achieving the UN task would enable us to
accomplish all the others more efficiently. Unfortunately, without a long-range
radio, we can’t contact Earth.”

“So
we fly there in person,” Zeiss said.

Indignant,
Mira ripped the marker out of his hand before he could write anything else.
“And give them the chance to finish the job?”

“We
go in covertly.”

“You’re
still willing to give them everything?” Mira asked, her voice growing louder.
“We offered them the keys to interstellar community, space travel, and human
biology, and they killed a third of us.” With his marker, she added the word
JUSTICE to the center of the list in large, capital letters.

“I
agree we should be selective about sharing technology, but we didn’t undertake
this mission for our own benefit,” Zeiss said, stroking her back. “We did this
for our species.”

“Any
word on precisely who did this to us?” Pratibha asked, addressing Mira’s
concern.

Stu
replied, “The array’s software was custom. The signature was an elaborate E01.”

Borrowing
Stu’s marker, Zeiss wrote Intelligence with lines to Justice and UN. “If we can
get Oleander on Earth in a sneak suit, she can find out who sponsored this
attack. Her Out-of-Body talent would be invaluable in the search. Then we can
make contact with UN leadership.”

“You
and I would be shot on sight by our own governments,” Mira said.

Yvette,
their legal expert, wrote the word Independence. “We can negate the charges
against us and bargain from a position of strength if we declare
Sanctuary
to be an independent nation under the rules of the UN space charter.”

The
idea had been discussed before, but too many had opposed the gesture as
disloyal to their countries of origin. Now, everyone voted in favor of the
measure.

“Does
that mean we can declare war on the assholes who fired on us?” Mira asked.

Yvette
winced. “Theoretically, if our leader deemed it necessary and a majority of the
council agrees. However, we must first present evidence of the crime under
international law and give the affected countries an opportunity for redress.”

Oleander
shook her head. “We can’t trust governments. They’d murder us all in secret for
the chance at this ship.”

“So
we approach the public directly. We send an ambassador with an offer they can’t
refuse,” Zeiss suggested.

“If
the governments don’t meet our terms, we’ll leave them to rot in their own
filth,” Mira said. “No Magi tech to save them from themselves.”

Yvette
added the condition Ultimatum to the flow diagram.

Oleander
asked the question hanging in everyone’s mind. “What if they harm the
ambassador?”

Mira
answered coldly, “Our engines have the power to destroy their planet two
hundred and fifty times over.” When the team looked at her in shock, she added,
“Theoretically.”

“Ultimatum,
Fortune, and Intelligence,” Zeiss said, tapping the words on the table.
“Fortune Enterprises always has the annual stockholders’ meeting on June
twenty-sixth, in LA—Claudette Fortune’s birthday. It’s in the bylaws. As
stockholders, Mira and I have a right to be heard. The meeting can give us
access to custom parts for the shuttle and international media coverage.”

“We
can’t risk either of you,” the doctor said to the Zeisses, “or the rest of us
would never be able to fly
Sanctuary
.”

Zeiss
replied. “We can’t afford to send our only physician, either. I can give my 2
percent proxy to any adult, whomever we choose as ambassador.”

“Why
do we need stock?” Stu asked.

“Money
and influence. The UN will have frozen all our bank assets, but we still need
to purchase rare earth elements to fix Snowflake.”

Oleander
said, “I’ll be the spy, but that means I’m not the front man. Someone else will
need to make a flashy entrance and create a distraction for me.”

“Don’t
look at me,” Yvette said. “The Ethics Page forces me to tell the truth—not a
good quality in a spy or the front man. I nominate the mayor.”

“I
can’t go. If I die, so does your doctor,” Pratibha said. “Risa is in no shape
to travel. That leaves Stu as the only pilot for the shuttle. As charming as
his talent makes him to women of science, he would also be the ideal front
man.”

“All
right!” Stu cheered.
I’m going to Earth.

Mira
opened her mouth to object, but Zeiss raised a hand. “He’s a man now. Let him
be one.”

After
a moment of silence, where static popped loudly over the dining-room speakers,
Stu asked, “All in favor of me joining Oleander for the landing?”

Oleander
and Mira abstained, but the measure passed.

Pratibha
said, “Don’t worry about losing the boy just yet. We have no shuttle, and won’t
have one by June.
Sanctuary
can’t get close to Earth without causing
major disruptions.”

Joan
cleared her throat. “I have a solution for that, but if I share it, I want to
ride along as the third member of the landing party.”

“Out
of the question,” her mother snapped.

“Hear
her out,” Zeiss cautioned. “She has many of your memories and skills up until
the moment of conception.” The Magi DNA transferred key parental abilities so
children could function much the way many mammals were born able to walk. “Her
hand-to-hand abilities would take anyone by surprise, and she can extend her Out-of-Body
talent as a psi-bolt to disrupt her opponent’s nervous system.”

Stu
knew from personal experience as her sparring partner, if Joan could touch him,
she could incapacitate him.

“It’s
too much to risk,” Oleander said.

Joan
took her mother’s hand. “If you died, I would feel the same about your loss. As
the one who holds the communal memory, I am the logical choice to witness the
offer—for the sake of history.”

“She’s
a member of the crew,” Yvette said. “Ethically, we have to risk as much for
Earth as we did the people of Labyrinth.” Everyone on
Sanctuary
had
dedicated five years to free and educate the panda race. Two crew members had
given their lives.

“We
don’t owe the snakes from Earth anything,” Mira said. “They killed our
friends.”

Zeiss
put an arm around her. “By now, there should be about nine billion of those
snakes. Surely you wouldn’t condemn all of them because of a few.”

“We
can’t sacrifice our children,” Oleander insisted.

Auckland
stared at the two dissenters. “The way I see it, without importing more people
from Earth, we won’t be having any more children. We can hide up here
indefinitely, but where’s the profit? Our mission was to save Earth. Sometimes
a mission demands sacrifice.”

“Then
we should send as many agents as possible,” Oleander said.

Joan
shook her head. “My way can hold up to three.”

Stu
perked up. The aliens did everything in threes. “She’s talking about the Magi escape
pod. About five years ago, Joan and I discovered it while playing hide and
seek. With her funny DNA, she’s the only one who can open it.”

“Why
didn’t you tell us?” asked Zeiss.

“I
told my mom.”

“Could
we even pilot the escape pod?”

“I
found an instruction manual—one of the fancy, golden pages the Magi use for
teaching.” Stu tapped his forehead. “It downloaded as soon as I touched it. The
escape pod is more of a glorified parachute.” He described the microthrusters
in the pod, tiny cousins to the large Icarus fields that drove the starship.
The primary constraint was fuel.

“Reading
that Page is why you started flight school at thirteen. I didn’t start till age
fourteen,” Mira said. “Five talents inherited from your parents, plus this
one—you must be the only human alive with more talents than I have. I’d be a
hypocrite if I didn’t support you. Congratulations, Ambassador Llewellyn.”

Grinning,
Stu accepted her handshake. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the three of us there
safely. The hard part will be finding a ride back home.”

After
the meeting, they buried the dead near the waterfall in the ecosphere, next to
Johnny, Joan’s father.