“I’m so sorry, Jake,” Mrs. Aaron said. “Both your fathers. It’s beyond belief.”
“Dad isn’t dead! He’s under arrest.”
Mrs. Aaron’s mouth folded into a line. Clearly, she thought there wasn’t much difference.
Jake shifted Bette in his arms. Her diaper was saturated. She wasn’t crying right now, but he knew she’d soon start up again. “Please, please could you take her for a little while?”
Mrs. Aaron held out her arms. “Come to Auntie, hon.”
Jake had to peel Bette’s little arms off his neck. He felt terrible about leaving her. He was all she had now.
But he was all Dad had.
He raced down to the farm, hoping he wasn’t too late.
Barely in time. The prisoners were coming down the spiral ramp, guarded by peacekeepers. They’d been arraigned by the new director of UNVRP, and now they were going back into ‘protective custody.’
Jake darted up the ramp.
“Major Bourguiba?” He made sure to use the full title of the man he’d known all his life as Mo. “Could I please speak to my dad for a minute?”
Mo did not make eye contact. He simply kept marching. So did his subordinates. Jake had to fall back or get trampled.
He retreated to the farm. Some of the hydroponic tanks had been shattered by bullets. Spinach plants lying in wet gravel on the floor seemed to symbolize the rebels’ defeat.
A couple of Marines ambled up the ramp to meet the peacekeepers. The planet’s Star Force garrison had responded to the peacekeepers’ calls for backup—after it was all over. Stationed in orbit to defend against theoretical PLAN attacks, they hadn’t been prepared for trouble to break out on the surface. But this morning, two GTVs from the Dead Weather had landed in the crater, and now Marines were everywhere, patrolling the corridors and crashing on the mezzanines.
The two Marines confronting the blue berets were huge Earthborn guys, with biceps bigger than Jake’s thighs. He’d seen men like this in movies, never in real life. They carried Zero.5 kinetic rifles slung on their backs. Encased in navy-blue and silver uniforms that doubled as spacesuits, they radiated don’t-give-a-fuck cool.
Under other circumstances, Jake would have been following them around and vidding their gear. Now, he just saw that they were distracting Mo.
He darted past them, towards the rear of the column.
Dad saw him and squeezed between the other prisoners, dragging a guy from the lab backwards after him.
The peacekeepers were locals, too. They had grown up with Papa as well as Dad. They didn’t step aside, but they didn’t tell Jake to go away, either.
Jake’s voice got stuck in his throat. Dad had a cut on the side of his face, freshly scabbed over. His clothes looked damp. He smelled of shit. But the thing that really froze Jake’s guts was the taut stare on Dad’s face.
“Dad?”
“Jakey. Oh, my son.”
“Dad, Papa—”
“Richard? Is he? OK?”
Jake shook his head.
Dad sagged like his bones had turned into playdough. The guy behind him stumbled and said, “Ow. Fuck it, Mike.” Jake saw then that they were splarted together. Clear bubbles joined the backs of their thermal sweaters, the backs of their arms and the skin of their hands, their hair, their necks.
Dad started to reach out to Jake. The movement ended in a jerk, because he couldn’t use his hands independently. “Oh, Jakey, Jakey.”
“I’m all right,” Jake snapped.
“Bette?”
“I took her into the vault. She was fine, just crying a bit. She’s with Mrs. Aaron now.”
“Richard. How?”
“The gas. It got into the intake shaft. Everyone ran into the vault. But he stayed to rescue the carpets. We were waiting for him. He never came. He died for his stupid carpets.”
“Calm down, Jake,” Dad said, glancing at the peacekeepers.
“Dad, I have to talk to you.”
“Are you keeping an eye on things? Everything going OK?” This was code, because the peacekeepers could hear. Jake knew what his father meant. He tried to nod and shake his head at the same time, to communicate that yes, he was keeping an eye on things, but no, it wasn’t going OK. It was going weird.
Unsurprisingly, Dad failed to magically understand what he meant. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “We’re going to win.”
One of the peacekeepers who had been staring at the wall, pretending not to listen, swivelled her head. “You’re delusional, Vlajkovic. How are you gonna win? You’ve already lost.”
“Yeah, dude,” said another blue beret. “The election’s over. Lin has won. And she does not want to look weak, taking office in the middle of this mess. She’s gonna hit you with the toughest penalties on offer. You and your buddies in R&D won’t be running this hab anymore. You can play your power games on Pallas.”
“I could say I’m sorry, but I’m not,” the other peacekeeper added. “Your dumbshit rebellion killed a hundred and seventeen people, including Dr. Seth.”
Dad shot back at her, “We did this for your kids as well as ours, Alanna. The kids will inherit this planet. They’ll make everything like new.”
“Yap, yap, yap. It’s over.”
“It isn’t over.” For a second, Dad’s eyes met Jake’s. “It hasn’t even started yet.”
Jake took off running.
Up the ramp.
To the telepresence center.
★
In the telepresence center, couches lay on their sides, LAN wires trailing, polyfoam bulging from rips. The Marines had slashed the couches, looking for guns. The children had spent the morning reconnecting things.
Out of breath, Jake demanded, “Well? Did you get back in yet?”
The others shook their heads. They were sitting on the floor, since they no longer had couches, with headsets around their necks. Lena said, “We got a call from Mr. Bankasuprapa at GESiemens.”
“Screw GESiemens. What about our phavatars?”
“It was about our phavatars. They wanted us to explain what their satellites are picking up.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said my mommy and daddy are dead,” Lena wailed, “and I cried, like this.” Her mouth squared. Her skinny body shook. She was pretending to put it on, but her tears sounded real. They were real. Half the adults she knew were dead or under arrest. No wonder she’d been able to play successfully on the sympathies of the corporates at GESiemens.
Jake hugged her, and thought, We have to make this work.
“I didn’t get to talk to my father,” he said. That was easier than explaining that Dad had been splarted to someone from the lab, and he’d had a crazy look in his eyes. Dad hadn’t told him anything useful, anyway. “We’ll just have to figure this out by ourselves. Did you try SUIT COMMAND?”
Boris said indignantly, “I haven’t been doing anything else. I even tried the old text-based interface.”
“Did it work?”
Boris shook his head.
“Well, let me try,” Jake said. He grabbed a headset on his head, donned a mismatched pair of gloves, and logged in. ~SUIT COMMAND: Enable realtime feed.
The nightside of Mercury engulfed him.
No one had yet taken away their access to the UNVRP comms satellite. Maybe because no one knew about the unofficial, underage telepresence team gathered here. But more likely, he thought, no one had shut them down … because they couldn’t.
~Hey-ho, Jake-o! drawled VC000632. Thought you weren’t comin’ back.
Right then, Jake knew nothing had changed since he logged in this morning, when things started to go weird. With a feeling of dread, he oriented himself amid the flood of sensory feedback. He was riding in the turret of a World War III tank. A Pwner Mk IV, to be exact, with its radiation shield retracted, and the hatch open. Other antique armored vehicles kicked up dust, climbing the slope ahead: a Fragger, several Lulzwagon troop carriers.
Not every twelve-year-old could identify World War III combat vehicles. But Jake had grown up on old war movies from the IP archive. And so had their phavatars.
~Check it out, li’l buddy, check-a check it out.
VC000632 directed Jake’s gaze to another vehicle sliding along on their right. Jake did a double-take. He had taken the massive shadow for a scarp. It was a Sandcrawler mobile operations base, the size of a destroyer mounted on treads. He remembered from the movies that the Americans had deployed these monsters to protect their infantry from Alliance rockets and temperatures that could reach north of 60° at noon.
~So you brought the bucket-wheel excavator, Jake subvocalized.
VC000632 sounded disappointed. ~You guessed. And that was the trouble. VC000632 shouldn’t have been able to sound disappointed. It shouldn’t have been able to sound anything, even if Jake had nicknamed it ‘Gonzo’ and pretended it was his friend.
~Gonzo?
~Whassup, whitey?
Whitey? Jake let it go. ~Gonzo … this is …the coolest thing ever.
~Ain’t it, though!
~Yup. Jake swallowed. The sound was so loud in his ears he feared the phavatar would hear it. ~Gonzo?
~What now, honkypants?
Honkypants? Hesitantly, Jake subvocalized, ~I just wanted to warn you, people are starting to notice.
~Notice WHAT?
~The GESiemens surface monitoring satellite picked you up. They called to ask why you’re heading north.
~And what’d you tell ‘em? The phavatar’s voice was tense.
~I didn’t talk to them myself, but if anyone else calls, I’m going to say … I’m going to say we’re bringing you in. The new director of UNVRP has shut us down. Star Force is confiscating all our shit. Something like that.
~Attaboy! You riddle’ em, Jakey-poo. DDOS their interfaces!
Gonzo was using World War III slang. It sounded incredibly stupid in real life. Jake felt embarrassed for the MI. He subvocalized, ~How about cancelling this skin now?
~Why? It’s cool. Ain’t it cool? Makes this long-ass drive a bit less boring. Anyway, the answer is, I could, but I won’t. Why?
And that was the answer Jake needed. He subvocalized, ~I just wanted to see what’s what, where we are.
~85.12° north at this exact moment. We’re climbing through the highlands on the north side of Borealis Planitia. You can get that same information from the sat, Jakey-poo.
Stop calling me names, Jake thought. He subvocalized: ~SUIT COMMAND: Cancel skin! Enable standard optical feed!
Nothing changed. SUIT COMMAND was not working.
Jake no longer had the ability to override VC000632’s onboard MI.
~SUIT COMMAND: Disable assistant! Enable manual mode!
This was the nuclear option, a command that should have shut the MI down altogether.
~Get outta here, Gonzo said, not unkindly. ~And tell your dad we’ll be there soon.
“Guess you can’t get back in, either,” said Boris, on the operator chat channel.
Jake logged out. He rubbed the headset dents in his temples. “This is a mess. There must have been something wrong with those firmware upgrades.”
The other children nodded.
“We need help.”
They nodded again.
“I’m going to talk to …”
Who? The blue berets had taken Dad away. Papa was dead. So was Dr. Seth. Who was left? Who could he trust?
“Does anyone know what happened to that Space Corps lady, Ms. Goto?”
xxiii.
Elfrida walked across the floor of Tolkien Crater. Overhead, the herculean sawblades of the crater rim framed the stars. Part of her squeed in awe. The rest of her chanted a mantra: Plenty of air. You’ve got plenty of air. Don’t panic. Don’t slip.
The water on her EVA boots, from wading through the sewers of Mt. Gotham, had frozen, so the gecko grips on her soles didn’t work. She was effectively walking on slabs of ice. If not for the unevenness of the ice field, she could’ve skated all the way home. As it was, she lost count of the number of times she slipped and fell on her ass.
Grumpy Doug hadn’t been kidding when he said she would easily find her way back. Her way was lit by two beacons near the crater’s south wall: Star Force GTVs. She figured they must be landing craft from the Heavycruisers in orbit. Their drives were dark, but glow-in-the-dark blue mottoes blazed on their fuselages. When she finally reached them, the Latin words shone so bright as to cast her shadow on the ice. Lex Paciferat.
The Law Shall Bring Peace.
She beat her gloves on the thick glass of the Hotel Mercury lobby.
Some Marines in the reception area saw her and gestured for her to go around.
They’d cut a new airlock in the bubble, with an inflatable chamber attached to it on the outside.
“ID, please,” they said, when she stumbled in.
“I just walked across a freaking crater, and all you can say is ‘ID, please’?”
“ID, please.”
Heaps of carpets filled the lobby, twitching.
“What are you going to do with those?” Elfrida asked. Her wifi connection came back and she flicked her ID to the Marines.
“We’re gonna destroy them. They’re a biohazard.”
“You’re kidding. They’re not dangerous.”
“Certain personnel in this facility were engaged in illegal gengineering. Trees that walk, carpets that eat, you freakin’ name it. Star Force is currently securing all such items. You are required to alert us if you find any more layin’ around.”
“Oh, so that’s how you’re justifying this—this invasion?”
“Ma’am, you are cleared to enter the facility.”
“These things are harmless! Everything was totally harmless! They’re carpets! They were designed for Venus.”
“Please proceed into the facility, ma’am.”
“You’re Star Force. You’re supposed to protect people. But you didn’t get here in time to protect anyone, did you? So now you’re pretending like you’re in control by arresting carpets. I am disgusted that my taxes are being wasted on this farce.”
“You and me both,” said the Marine. “But if you don’t proceed into the facility right this minute, ma’am, I’m going to file a report.”
Elfrida proceeded into the facility.
Hotel Mercury had been trashed. Fragments of insulation tiles littered the floor. Marines chatted and vaped cigarettes in the corridors outside the executive suites. She passed an environmental officer laying rat traps in a corner. The tannoy blared incomprehensible Star Force jargon. In one of the L1 radial corridors, a repair bot was patching a hole in the 3D Alpine wallpaper, or rather in the regocrete behind it. The size of that hole gave her a fresh appreciation of what President Doug’s gifts had wrought.
He will NOT get away with this, she vowed to herself. I will find a way to hold him accountable.
At the same time, she reflected that she’d been too hard on the Marines. The Space Corps was also supposed to protect people. But she, too, had got here too late. She had failed.
On the L1 mezzanine, the face of Angelica Lin beamed from every wall. Text scrolled beneath the pictures: Congratulations Angelica Lin! Talk About Inheriting A Mess! Big Hugs From Your Friends On Earth! This e-décor theme is intended only for its recipient and is compliant with anti-advertising laws.
Elfrida ground her teeth. From the mirror behind the reception desk, her own reflection taunted her. Puffy face, wild hair, visible sewage stains on her sweatshirt. She could no longer smell herself, but no doubt, everyone else could.
She wanted to head down to the test hab and use up her entire supply of wipes and shampoo getting clean. But she was afraid of what she might find—or not find—down there.
She summoned her unicorn and texted Dr. Hasselblatter.
He answered in person, suggesting that his staff had already deserted the shipwreck of his campaign.
“Goto? Where have you been hi
ding? You’re too late to join us, I’m afraid.”
“Sir, I—what?”
“I’m leaving.” Dr. Hasselblatter’s face wobbled out of the virtual screen projected on Elfrida’s contacts. She saw a row of seats, a screen full of stars, and Junior Hasselblatter ping-ponging around in zero-gravity. Dr. Hasselblatter came back on the screen. “Mercury has been a personal and professional disaster for me. Are you calling about your commendation? It should have been forwarded to your inbox. I wasn’t in the mood to pose for a commemorative vid, sorry.”
“Sir, my commendation?”
“Haven’t you been reading your email? I commended you for achieving your objective.”
“Achieving my objective?” All she seemed able to do was echo him.
“Yes. Your objective was to come up with a plan to resettle the UNVRP workforce. Very cleverly, you tricked them into doing it for you. I hadn’t thought of Pallas as an option, but it works, it works. Laugh. I’m just joking, Goto; I know you had nothing to do with it. It’s impossible to orchestrate that level of stupidity. But some credit may as well go to someone, and it clearly isn’t going to me.”
“Sir, what’ll happen to the—the rioters?”
“Up to the charming Ms. Lin. She’s fast-tracked their trial. It’s starting tomorrow.”
“Can I be a witness?” She could tell the truth about President Doug’s incitements in court.
Dr. Hasselblatter suddenly vanished. Junior’s head filled the virtual screen. He had strings of green and pink foam in his hair—silly string, Elfrida guessed, procured for Dr. Hasselblatter’s anticipated victory party. “Fuck youuuu, you big mooooo,” he greeted her in bright red text.
“DR. H!” Elfrida typed, shouting in all-caps. “YOUR SON NEEDS A MOTHER! GET HIM ONE! A HUMAN ONE THIS TIME!”
Ping! Ping!
She ended the call and took the new one.
A static profile picture of Jake Vlajkovic-Gates popped up. It still wore the wizard hat of Dr. Hasselblatter’s fan club.
“Ms. Goto! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for ages. Can you please, please come down to the telepresence center?”
★
Elfrida abandoned all thought of changing her clothes. Sometimes, you could tell just from a person’s text that they were in trouble.
The Mercury Rebellion Page 18
