The Mercury Rebellion

by Felix R. Savage

“She’s a smart cookie.”

  “Yeah.” Elfrida paused. “I have a question. Did you really care about her? Or did you just want to take her away from me?”

  “Oh, Goto,” Lin said.

  “What? I asked you a question. Did you ruin my life on purpose, or just because you didn’t give a shit?”

  “I hoped you would realize she was wrong for you.”

  “That’s so doggone condescending. You don’t even know me.”

  Lin’s voice rose. “Do not ever, ever accuse me of not giving a shit. I’m here because I gave a shit. Somebody had to.”

  Elfrida spotted the mysterious pelican case on a nearby bench. Beside the case lay Lin’s EVA suit, folded. Under the bench were the bloodstained clothes Lin had been wearing. She must have been desperate to get out of them.

  And from under the wadded clothes poked the Zero.5.

  Elfrida dived for it. Lin hadn’t expected that, but she reacted fast. She dived, too, and their hands closed on the weapon at the same time. They rolled together onto the floor, face to face. Elfrida got one foot against Lin’s stomach and pushed, but Lin’s hands stayed fast on the gun.

  “Let’s not have an accidental discharge in here,” Lin panted.

  “Let go!”

  “I mean it, Goto! I don’t know how good the containment is.”

  Elfrida’s reply was a grunt, scaling into a scream as she exerted all her strength to pry Lin’s hands off the gun. She had an advantage: she was wearing EVA gloves. It might have been a disadvantage, as it made her that bit clumsier, but this high-end suit had twisted polymer fibers embedded in the fingers of its gloves, giving her the powerful grip of a machine. One by one, she bent back the manicured digits that were wrapped around the trigger guard.

  Lin let go and scooted back on her ass, grimacing in pain.

  Elfrida jumped up, holding the Zero.5. It was a Marine weapon, so no safety. Point and shoot, she rehearsed in her mind.

  “Go on, then,” Lin panted, glaring. “Do it.”

  “Are you sorry?” Elfrida demanded.

  “What? Oh. You still think I killed all those people. Yes, I am sorry, but not for that.”

  “For what, then?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Just get it over with.”

  Elfrida knew Lin was making a last-ditch attempt to manipulate her.. But she was the one with the gun now. Nothing Lin said could change that. “Why did you come here? Is someone coming to pick you up?”

  “Ha, fucking ha. No, I was hoping there’d be a ship here. A Flyingsaucer. Something.”

  “And if there had been? Where were you planning to go?”

  “Luna,” Lin said, her eyes fluttering closed.

  “In a Flyingsaucer?”

  “I never said I had a plan. I’d have made a sub-orbital hop to the nightside. See if I could find something better at Yoshikawa. But there aren’t any ships here, so that’s that.”

  Luna, Elfrida thought. She remembered Grumpy Doug asking her if she’d made any enemies on Luna lately.

  Screw it. She had let Lin stall her long enough.

  She levelled the Zero.5. The change in her stance activated the targeting laser. A red dot bobbled over Lin’s chin.

  “Wait,” Lin said, twisting her face out of the way. “Before you shoot me, you might want to know who you’ll be killing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, hell, Goto. That suspicious look on your face, I remember it so well. Funny thing is, it still hurts.”

  Elfrida lowered the Zero.5. Her mind reeled. She stared at Angelica Lin’s luscious, haggard features.

  “I had a lot of surgery. Had to change my face completely, to throw the ISA off my trail. Even got my irises done.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  But even as Elfrida spoke, she knew that Lin was telling the truth. “Gloria dos Santos,” she whispered. “Ma’am.”

  Angelica Lin was Gloria dos Santos, who’d been Elfrida’s boss on Botticelli Station.

  Elfrida had let appearances distract her from the truth that was staring her in the face.

  Now, Lin’s crooked smile looked familiar.

  “Wow, ma’am.” Elfrida let the Zero.5 hang from her glove. The targeting laser switched itself off.

  “Oh, call me Glory.” Dos Santos got up off the floor. “I’ve missed you, Goto.”

  “I almost killed you.”

  “You still can if you like. But why bother? In a few hours, we’re both going to be dead, anyway.”

  xxxii.

  Jake had never before left UNVRP HQ. Never gone outside. Never worn an EVA suit. (Much less one that had been peeled off a dead person.) It creeped him out, although he wasn’t telling Doug that.

  Doug might not have taken him along if he knew how scared Jake was.

  He’d left Bette with Mrs. Aaron again. She hadn’t been part of the mob that wanted to sacrifice them to the Heidegger program. He still trusted her. You had to trust someone.

  “Just stay close and don’t get lost,” Doug said.

  One of Dad’s friends, a guy named Lester who worked in UNVRP’s water refinery, had claimed the other spare EVA suit. The foursome walked through the water mines. Jake kept his gaze trained on Doug’s heels. He was trying to walk exactly where Doug did, so he wouldn’t get lost.

  This place was so big. Glossy black support pillars marked out endless avenues. In the hollows where they were walking, water had lain for millennia in the form of ice, until it got scraped out and turned into coffee and baby formula and drinking water. Papa had sometimes mentioned that there were organic volatiles down here, too. Comet dust, embedded in the ice. They didn’t have the equipment to reclaim that stuff, so they just refined it out and threw it away. Such a waste. Jake heard Papa’s voice in his memory. The way we do things is such a waste.

  Jake’s eyes got hot, and he cried for a little while inside his helmet.

  When the moment passed, he saw that they were walking along a tunnel. His neck was sticky with tears, and the inside of his faceplate had fogged up.

  A voice crackled into his helmet. “Heads up, Jake.” It was Lester, the guy from the water refinery. “Far’s I know, this is a dead end.”

  “Is this where we stopped drilling?”

  “Oh, you’re talking about when we hit the rocky layer. No, that’s all over the place, probably the impact debris from a major collision … maybe even the one that created Tolkien Crater. This here is the tunnel that used to connect our water mine to theirs. The Americans blocked it off a few years ago.”

  “We didn’t block the tunnel off,” Doug broke in. “We sealed it.”

  “Whoops,” Lester said. “Thought that was a private channel.”

  “You’re in Little America now. There are no private channels.”

  Doug stopped. They all stopped.

  Their helmet lamps illuminated a black wall. It looked like a dead end to Jake.

  Then the wall split down the middle.

  Glowstrip light flooded through, blue-tinged, just like home.

  They walked into a broader, cleanly bored tunnel with a regocrete floor. It stayed level for a bit and then angled sharply down. Lester fingered the walls and muttered about the rocky layer.

  Doug said, “We got past it.”

  “So I see.”

  “Imported a new drilling rig a few years back.”

  “I remember. And shortly after that, you blocked off … excuse me, sealed this tunnel.”

  “That’s right.”

  “As if there was something,” Lester said, “you didn’t want us to know about.”

  The tunnel opened out into a cavern. There was a huge chunk of gear suspended over a pit in the middle of the floor. Lester walked over to it. “A hoist?” He braced his hands on his thighs and looked down into the pit. “Guess that’s your new drilling rig down there.”

  “Right,” Doug said. “Turns out the rocky layer’s only a few meters thick. Below that: ice again. There’s more water on this pla
net than anyone ever imagined.”

  “And not only water!” Jake broke in. He finally knew what he was looking at, and he was so mad he spoke without thinking. “There’s other stuff down there, too! Embedded in the ice. I bet you’ve found a totally mega deposit of helium-3!”

  For a moment there was silence. Jake regretted speaking. Maybe he was wrong.

  “You nailed it, Jake,” Doug said. He sounded sad.

  “Why, you—” Lester.

  “How much He3 are you getting out of there?” Jake said.

  “You’d have to talk to our mining crew to get the output figures. Can we move on now?”

  Jake was not ready to move on. “I knew it. We used to find He3 deposits on the surface sometimes. Titchy ones. But if there’s some out there, it makes sense that there would be more in the permanently shadowed craters. Oh, God! I feel really stupid now.”

  “Not as stupid as I feel,” Lester said. “You found He3 on the surface, Jake? And you never mentioned it to anyone?”

  “Um. Uh …”

  “Mike Vlajkovic used to bring us sacks of unrefined ore,” Doug said. “We pre-processed it and sold it on. Again, I’m not familiar with the details.”

  “Clearly, I’ve been wasting my time in the water refinery,” Lester said. “I should’ve farmed the job out to my kid and gone into the smuggling business. I always wondered how Mike’s crew made such a profit off of coffee.”

  “Let’s keep walking,” Doug said, his voice taut. “And be aware. Just because we haven’t been jumped yet, doesn’t mean it’s safe. I still can’t raise our people on the radio. Worst case scenario, the Heidegger program has already penetrated our infrastructure, and I don’t need to spell out for you what that means.”

  xxxiii.

  The boarding lounge of the spaceport was no longer silent. Elfrida and Gloria dos Santos sat crosslegged on a bench, eating pretzels and hummus from the concession stand, catching up on the last three years.

  “After I escaped from the Kharbage Can,” dos Santos said, “I went to Midway.”

  “Wow, I’ve always wanted to go there,” Elfrida said. Midway was the shipyard and fuel depot that floated in space at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point. Like most things in space, it had started off as a bare-bones resources operation, and grown. People said you could buy or sell anything on Midway if the price was right.

  “I wasn’t there long,” dos Santos said. “I sold the Superlifter. And then I called Charlie.”

  “You never mentioned him …”

  They’d worked together for two years on Botticelli Station, but dos Santos had been extremely private about her personal life.

  “Charlie wasn’t a part of my life when I was on B-Station. When I called him from Midway, it was the first time we’d talked in twenty years. But it was like no time had passed at all. He came to get me.”

  Elfrida pushed pretzel crumbs around with a finger. They floated like grains of flour in the low gravity. Back when they worked together, she’d been in love with dos Santos. A stupid, adolescent crush, but it had stayed with her. She realized now that not even dos Santos’s betrayal had killed her feelings for the older woman.

  Sternly, she reminded herself that even though this was dos Santos, it was also Angelica Lin.

  But who was Angelica Lin? What had she done?

  “So then you changed your identity,” she prompted.

  “Right.”

  “Was that Charlie’s idea, or yours?”

  “All I was thinking was, how do I drop out of sight? But I had to have an identity that would hold up to public scrutiny. So Charlie used his connections to get into the Star Force archives. He replaced Angelica’s DNA record with mine.” Dos Santos spread her hands: as easy as that, the gesture said. And so it was, in an age when DNA was the bedrock of identity.

  “Who was Angelica Lin, anyway? I mean, the original Angelica Lin. I guess she’s dead.”

  A strange expression crimped dos Santos’s features. She dipped a pretzel stick into her tub of hummus and ate it, her gaze downcast. “Oh yes, she’s dead.”

  “Why did you pick her identity to use?”

  “Because I knew her. We all knew each other. It was twenty-three years ago, but it feels like yesterday. Looking back, the Space Corps must’ve been nuts, to send an untested twenty-two-year-old to Callisto ...”

  23 Years Earlier. Callisto

  Mad Konstantin was in a good mood. He danced around the admin module with his favorite bot, Trix, while the bot sang an old song, music and all.

  Konstantin had worked out a deal with Star Force.

  C-Mutt held out his hand to Glory dos Santos, who didn’t need to be asked twice. The two of them started dancing, too. Angelica stood with her arms folded, watching the foursome trade partners.

  She hated herself these days.

  Couldn’t even get excited about being rescued.

  Konstantin had got everything he wanted. Star Force was going to give him a ship to get away in, and 50,000 troy ounces of physical iridium.

  So much for the stars and the planets, Angelica thought. All he really wants is cash.

  In exchange, Konstantin had promised to let Star Force rescue the 68 people left alive at Valhalla Base.

  There’s no way this is not going to go wrong.

  But there was nothing she could do about it.

  “Santa Claus is coming to town,” sang Konstantin, along with the tune being piped from Trixie’s mouth. “Santa Claus is coming to town!” He whirled overhead, dragging a flushed Glory dos Santos. “Whatsa matter, Angelica? Don’t you know it’s Christmas?”

  It was Christmas. Christmas Eve, to be precise. They’d been cooped up in here for five months, getting thinner and sicker, their hopes of rescue dwindling. Back on Earth, people were decorating their trees and wrapping presents. The drama on far-away Callisto had vanished off the news feeds. It had been going on for too long.

  When Angelica’s family was alive, they used to go to midnight Mass. Her father had belonged to Eastern Lightning, a fringey Protestant denomination, and that was where Angelica and her brothers got dragged on a weekly basis, but her mother had been raised Catholic, and once a year Geoffrey Lin had made allowances for her superstitions. They would pack into Our Lady of the Angels with the once-a-year crowd and listen to the hymns. Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel …

  Tears filled Angelica’s eyes.

  Everyone but her was dancing now, caught up in Konstantin’s elation. The blue-eyed kid from the software support section, whose name she’d forgotten, partnered another of Konstantin’s bots. It whirled him upside-down, and his laughter sounded like a little kid’s peal of laughter, reminding Angelica of her dead brothers.

  Then the music cut out.

  “Hey, Konstantin,” said the warm voice of the chief negotiator. “You guys ready to go? We’re setting the first Superlifter down in thirty minutes.”

  Konstantin bounded to the comms center. “My ship first! That is our deal. I get my ship first, do you copy that, Mr. Friendly?”

  “Sure, Konstantin! This is your ship. We’ve got a Farhauler waiting for you up here, just like you asked for, but it is not surface-capable, right? So you need this Superlifter to reach it.”

  “And my grace period of twenty-four hours starts after I board the Farhauler.”

  What did he think this was? A game of hide-and-seek? 24 hours wouldn’t make any difference to Star Force’s ability to find him, overhaul him, and frag him, as soon as the hostages were safe.

  “Sure, Konstantin! That’s fair,” said the negotiator.

  Anxious, no longer wisecracking, Konstantin got into his spacesuit. They all clustered around the single working viewport screen on the life support center. The Superlifter flashed down from the sky, a star falling across the face of Jupiter. It fell slower and slower, backthrusting, until it settled on the far side of Valhalla Crater. Then it went dark.

  “They could’ve put it down a bit closer,” Konstantin grumbled.


  He faced the hostages.

  “So. This is it. I’m leaving. Anyone else want to come?”

  For an instant, the only sound was the rattle of the CO2 scrubber pushing air through the torn old filter.

  C-Mutt opened his mouth. “I …” His breath clouded white. “Fuck you, Konstantin.”

  Angelica sagged in relief.

  “Why do you gotta be right? I’m with you. I was never gonna be a lawyer, anyway.”

  Angelica reeled.

  The other hostages smiled in approval, as if C-Mutt had taken a brave stand, as if this was what they’d expected of him.

  Angelica had expected it, too, she realized after her initial shock. She had known for some time that C-Mutt had come around to seeing the universe through Konstantin’s eyes. First the planets, then the stars …

  Glory dos Santos said, “I’m in, too. I want a piece of that physical iridium.”

  This was a lame attempt, in Angelica’s view, to disguise the fact that she just wanted to go wherever C-Mutt was going.

  “You, my friends,” Konstantin said solemnly, “are awesome human beings. Anyone else?”

  The blue-eyed kid from software support spoke up. “Um, I, well, I totally think you’re right, Konstantin. But, do you really think they’ll let you get away?”

  “Sure they will,” Konstantin said.

  C-Mutt and dos Santos were scrambling into spacesuits.

  “But if you’re not sure whether you want to go, Derek, you should probably stay here. We need allies inside the system, as well as outside it. So, if that sounds like you, just sit tight, and we’ll be in touch.”

  “OK,” the kid said, seeming relieved. Derek Lorna, that was his name. The smartest of the techies. He’d hacked the life support software to overcome the built-in margins of safety, and had manually shut down the admin module’s non-essential systems, allowing them to divert every last bit of power to air and water recycling. He’d saved their lives, basically. And he and C-Mutt, the two brainiest people in the hab, had both fallen for Konstantin’s bulshit. So, did that make Angelica stupid?

  She cleared her throat.

  “I’d like to come, too,” she said. “If you’ll have me, Konstantin.”