Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (30 page)
Read Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) Online
Authors: Scott Rhine
“Please refer to her as Yvette. She’s
fragile right now, and the interface might harm her.”
“Understood. May I speak to Mercy?”
“Briefly. She carries our child. Be
careful.”
“Your safety is my sacred duty.”
He slid out. The others had only
heard his half of the discussion, so Lou filled them in. “You don’t have to do
this, Mercy.”
She patted his hand. “You’re sweet.
If I had to worry about you, you get to spend an equal amount of time fretting
about my safety. Snowflake won’t allow me to come to harm.”
Once Mercy positioned herself under
the hood, Lou held her hand. She didn’t need words with Snowflake anymore.
Still, the exchange took ten minutes. When his wife emerged, Lou found her
forehead damp.
“I did some fast talking,” Mercy
said. “Since Yvette is Catholic, I was able to use an obscure corner of Canon
Law—under Catholic law, a woman cannot be forced into marriage by a kidnapper;
however, if after being back with her family for a short time, she chooses to
marry that man, she may.”
“You’re shitting me,” Lou said.
“Nope. According to church law,
rape and kidnapping can be retroactively legitimized.”
“There’s no way she’ll agree to
that.”
“She did love him. She only held
herself back to protect him, but all that’s her decision to make. All I did was
buy us some wiggle room.”
“When did you study Catholic laws?”
Lou asked.
“When I considered taking vows as a
nun,” she explained.
“But my raw appeal was too much for
you?”
“Actually, the idea that the pope
couldn’t be a woman turned me off the idea.”
“Right.” Lou started humming the
Rod Stewart song again.
Red cleared her throat. “Will we
have to write this into the charter?”
“No. I argued that Yvette was the
only remaining single Catholic woman, and the aliens we meet won’t be,” Mercy
said.
“Gravitic tidal swirls are less
convoluted,” Lou complained.
“You’re telling me,” Mercy agreed.
“Um . . . Snowflake wants to talk to the Index next.”
By comparison, Red’s time in the
interface was brief. When she came out, the room smelled of burned toast. She
wasn’t happy. “Gather everyone at camp, Mercy. We have a decision to make, and
I’d rather only explain this once. Conrad, sweetie, I need you to look at a
star system for me.”
****
Red addressed the entire camp
outside at the new picnic tables. “We have officially broken the charter, and
Sensei won’t allow us to travel to our original colony choice. They call it an
interdiction, but it’s more like a quarantine. They’re afraid to let us mingle
with mainstream spacefarers.” She paused to give this disappointing news time
to sink in. They’d failed their test before they reached the halfway mark. Do not
pass Go; do not collect 200 dollars. “But—and this is the important
part—because we gave our favorite rapist a second chance to make restitution
through service, we have the same option.”
The crowd buzzed. “What does that
mean?” asked Herk.
Zeiss held out the star-projecting
globe. “See this binary system with a high degree of declination? It’s pretty
far off the beaten path. The system contains a gas giant in the habitable zone
with several moons. One Earth-sized moon with an atmosphere is capable of
sustaining life. Because of the math involved and the incredibly long jump,
reaching there is almost impossible with our ship. Escaping there is even
harder because the window only opens for a short time every several years. I’ve
code-named this planet Oblivion.”
“We get to colonize there instead?”
guessed Herk.
Red answered, “No. It has stone-age
inhabitants already. Sensei wants us to advise them the way he did us. Through
service to other races, we’ll earn our way back into the club.”
“So the aliens will give us some
prefab information package to drop off?”
Grimly, Red shook her head. “No. It’ll
take years. We’ll have to study this race without them seeing us and write
pages for them from our own limited experiences. Sensei will give us the
specifics if we agree.”
“If we say no?”
“We stay here,” Zeiss replied. “Eventually
Earth might rescue our descendants. It’s just as likely that we could
accidentally break the biosphere and die. In every Midway scenario, we never
see home again.
Sanctuary
becomes a quarantine cell. This is important
enough that we should all vote, and it’s not a decision to make lightly.
Whatever we do, we’ll need to harvest everything we can in a few months. I’m
willing to schedule the vote then.”
“We’ll cut the water reserves too
fine. If we don’t gain access to vast reserves soon after we arrive in the
Oblivion system, we’re doomed,” Rachael announced. “I’m for staying at Midway.
We could have a good life here.”
Yuki stood up. “There has to be a
third option—getting home without subspace. We could accelerate to 99 percent
of the speed of light, and we wouldn’t age then. The fifteen-year return would
be a blink of an eye.”
Red announced, “344 days at
maximum-g thrust to reach 99 percent c. That’s if none of the engines blow.
Tell her what happens if one of the grav fields fails, Mercy.”
“Our subspace balloon implodes or
leaks out slowly, which will look the same to us. If one of the inertia-filtering
fields stop working, we turn into pancakes and die.”
“You’re exaggerating. The aliens
won’t let us do anything that isn’t safe,” Yuki insisted.
“Okay. How much fuel will that speed
take?” Zeiss demanded. Everyone who’d been with him at the Academy covered
their faces. He’d already figured all the answers and wanted the students to
see why.
“That’s not my specialization,”
Yuki mumbled.
The Korean drive expert helped her
out. “Half the original amount in the sphere—pretty much everything we have
left.”
Zeiss paced around the picnic area
as if it were a classroom. “How do we stop when we get to Earth?”
“We can’t. We just wave as we
streak by in our desert ball,” said Park.
Growing angry, Yuki stood up and
tipped her wooden bench over. “So we go half the speed of light or something so
it works out.”
“There’s a square root involved,
not a half, but say you’re close. With no more time compression, how are we
going to keep from freezing for thirty-one years with no sun?” Zeiss asked
patiently.
“The foggy lights we used in
subspace. Toby said we might not have lost heat if Mercy hadn’t blocked the
ultraviolet spectrum.”
The commander shrugged. “So we live
underground and accept that whoever harvests our food is going to die of
cancer?”
“We send them through
decontamination each time!”
“Up to sixty-sixty times because we
started with only eighty-one pods. Unfortunately, without subspace radiation,
we have no way to make the windows glow. But say we can generate power from the
grav fields. That would take half our power. We’d arrive ninety, blue, and—”
“You can put me in stasis; I’ll
still be young. I was promised things!” Yuki shouted. “Nobody asked me about
any of this before the trip started.”
Mercy wrapped her arms around the
irrational woman. “Shh. I know.”
When her friend calmed, Mercy said,
“The safest thing for my baby would be to stay here. We’ve all lost things to
the dangers of space, and there’s no end in sight. Sensei is asking us to do
things none of us are equipped for. I’m afraid of dozens of things that could
kill my husband every day.” She looked around the group. “I still say we finish
the mission we came to do because Earth won’t last much longer without us.”
The vote to continue to Oblivion
passed in ten minutes—only Yuki and Rachael dissented.
Over eight months pregnant, Kaguya Mori sat in front of the
TV screen at JPL. Except when
Sanctuary
was under the sheet, the
football-field-sized monitor still picked up the signals from the alien space
telescope and showed the world leaders on Earth whatever the lens of the stolen
spaceship aimed at. She rubbed her belly as she watched the movement of the
spheres and calculated where the path would take them next. Hordes of
scientists analyzed the transmission twenty-four hours a day. The heiress to
the biggest conglomerate in the world paid half their salaries just to watch.
Leaning down to talk to the baby
inside her, Kaguya said, “That’s your daddy up there. He’s going to be a big
hero someday, despite what those mean people said at the Hague. Conrad did this
for love. He’s going to come back and give us the keys to the universe.”
The child echoed affection at the
sound of her voice. Pleased, Momma decided to sing for a while. Recordings of
her impromptu, hypnotic serenades were climbing the charts under the title
Hymns
to Uzume
—the Japanese goddess of dawn, the great persuader, and the
heavenly alarming female. The complexity of the compositions was beyond Bach.
Studies were already underway to see if it increased the intelligence of the
infant in the womb, but Kaguya was indifferent. Either way, her precious,
little one would hold this world in the palm of its hand.
###
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