“Will do.”
“Blistering barnacles! We got us a live ‘un!”
Slim piscine shapes streaked out of the cave mouth at the wide end of the asteroid. Before Elfrida could decide whether to alter course or keep going, they surrounded her. Three times her size, they resembled silvery sharks with arms ending in scoops, grabbers, and drill bits. The phavatar analyzed the wisps of gas they were emitting. ~Ion-propulsion electrical thrusters. Propellant appears to be ammonia-based, it told her in the affectless voice of its onboard MI.
Jerking with rage on her couch, Elfrida commanded the phavatar to transmit a polite greeting. What was it for, if not to facilitate communication?
But by this time thirty seconds had passed, and the phavatar had not done anything except geekily chew over its own sensor data. A robot shark bit through Elfrida’s tethers and scooped her up. It rushed her to the asteroid, into the cave mouth, and down a broad tunnel into a cavern shadowed, rather than lit, by the headlights of a dozen more sharks crawling over the walls.
Released into freefall, Elfrida cannoned into the far wall at car-crash speed. On her couch on Vesta, she flinched instinctively. ~SUIT COMMAND: Full systems check! she subvocalized.
She rebounded, drifting. Rocky debris littered the air, ranging from micron-scale grains to fist-sized chunks. The robot sharks—demolition/salvage bots, she now understood—teemed on the walls of the cavern like cockroaches in a cheap hotel room. They towed nets that captured most of the debris they were excavating. She spotted a couple of larger structures near the entrance of the cavern. But the most interesting thing in view was several spacesuited figures powering towards her.
Interesting, and not in a good way. There were five of them, wearing hard-shell spacesuits with old-fashioned detachable mobility packs. The interesting thing was that they had no logos or nametags visible anywhere on their suits.
“Arrr, it’s only a bloody phavatar,” said the same voice that had hailed the Kharbage Collector. “Ahoy, matey!” He tapped her head with his glove. “Anyone home?”
At the same time, Petruzzelli said in her ear, “Hey, Elfrida. WTF? Wanna give me a visual feed?”
Also at the same time, the drones caught up, cheeping updates over her link. They had got into a dust-up with the robot sharks outside, and left several of them the worse for wear. They were prepared to similarly dispatch her interrogators if she gave the word.
“No! Hold off!” Elfrida shouted, praying she wasn’t too late. This, she told herself ferociously, is why you don’t accept the loan of semi-autonomous mobile weapons platforms, even from a friend. “Hello,” she said, making the phavatar smile into the dazzle of her captors’ helmet lamps. “My name’s Janice Rand.” Field agents used different aliases on each mission, randomly assigned by a computer program. “I’m from the Space Corps. If you haven’t heard of us, we’re a UN agency tasked with supporting the diversity, economic viability, and physical and mental health of human populations in space, with a special focus on asteroid-dwellers.”
This was the post-11073 Galapagos mission statement, rewritten to eliminate any reference to the fact that the Space Corps was under contract to the Venus Remediation Project. You weren’t even supposed to mention Venus now unless they asked. The shift in emphasis had been explained as “refocusing on our core mission,” but it had left a lot of agents confused as to what the core mission of the Space Corps was. Most agents of Elfrida’s generation had joined up specifically because of the UNVRP connection. They understood that their role was to procure asteroids for the Venus Project. Now, the emphasis on preserving the unique cultural values of space colonists often conflicted with the Venus Project’s needs.
One thing had not changed, anyway: Elfrida needed to establish a channel of communication that did not involve drones or robot sharks.
“This visit is a preliminary assessment. With your cooperation, I’ll be gathering information about your habitat, your population, and your long-term sustainability plan.” Assuming you have one, she thought, glancing around the cavern. The two large structures tethered to the wall looked like inflatable Bigelow habs. “For your information, I’m operating this phavatar from a remote location, so there will be a lag of several seconds before I can respond to you. But if you have any questions, ask away! Don’t be shy.”
“Shy?” said one of the smaller spacesuits. “We’re pirates! Pirates aren’t shy. Shiver me timbers,” it added, and giggled.
“Hell,” said the first voice. “She’s from the Venus Remediation Project.”
So much for tact. Colonists weren’t dumb.
“Yes,” Elfrida admitted. “The Space Corps is a top-level agency, but our mission is to facilitate UNVRP, among other things. But that doesn’t mean I’m here to kick you out and take your asteroid.” Which isn’t even yours, she thought. “As I mentioned, my goal at this time is to conduct a preliminary geological survey and population assessment.”
“Assess this,” the leader of the pirates said, and raised a sausage-shaped middle finger. So, not living in the seventeenth century, after all.
Slow-moving pebbles clonked against Elfrida’s frame. The phavatar completed its systems check and reported that it had sustained cosmetic damage to its head and torso, but was otherwise functional. The čapek-classes were built to take a pounding.
“Maybe we could get started by introducing ourselves?” Elfrida suggested.
While she waited for the pirates to respond, she replied to Petruzzelli’s increasingly urgent pleas for information. “I’ll give you a visual feed as soon as there’s anything to see.” She was putting Petruzzelli off. You weren’t supposed to share everything with your chauffeur. She felt bad about that, but not too bad, considering that Petruzzelli’s drones had gotten her off on the wrong foot with these people by maiming several of their D/S bots. “It looks like they’re mining the asteroid for valuable minerals.”
“In situ?” Petruzzelli asked skeptically. “Why not just bag it up and tow it back to their base?”
“It’s too big for that.”
“I’ve heard of asteroids the size of Manhattan being lifted. They vanish from their orbits and are never seen again, until their minerals turn up on freaking Ganymede or somewhere.”
“Well, maybe these guys don’t have a base. It looks like a shoestring operation.” Elfrida broke off. The pirates had finished their encrypted colloquy, and their leader was speaking to her on the public channel.
“Your drones have put four of our D/S bots out o’ commission. Beyond repair, they are. If ye really are from the UN, we’ll be wanting compensation for that.”
Elfrida laughed to herself. These guys had a handle on the system.
“Listen,” she said. “You aren’t dumb. And I don’t think you’re really pirates, either. So can we take the yo-ho-ho’ing as read, grab some air—” she gestured at the two inflatable habs— “and discuss how we can work together?”
Eleven seconds. Twelve seconds.
“Ye’re on,” said the leader. “But I warn ye, it’s a mess.” He streaked towards the smaller of the habs. “We weren’t expecting company. Arrr!”
★
With their EVA suits off, the pirates turned out to be two women, two men, and a boy of about ten. The child, so thin that Elfrida could almost see through his bare hands and feet, was prepubescent, but closing in on two meters tall. Spaceborn. The adults, in contrast, had standard Earthborn frames. Nevertheless, they all shared a buttery-brown skin tone and straight black hair. The leader wore his in dreadlocks.
“Haddock,” he introduced himself. “Ye can call me Captain. These are Coral and Anemone—” the women— “Codfish, and the kid is Kelp.”
“Nice to meet you,” Elfrida smiled. “Are you all related?”
Coral shuddered, Kelp giggled, and even Haddock winced. Elfrida figured they were reacting to her phavatar’s axe-murderer smile, rather than her question. “Aye,” Haddock said. “Anemone is my lady wife, Kelp is the fruit o�
�� our loins, Coral is Anemone’s sister, and Codfish is my brother and married to Coral.”
“For my sins,” said the dour-faced Codfish. “Also, I get the least cool name.”
“Someone had to be Codfish,” Haddock said. “Come tell me, who am I? A codfish, only a codfish!”
This gibberish had the ring of a quotation, and Elfrida thought of Captain Okoli of the Kharbage Can. He’d have known where it came from. She queried the UNVRP databank on Vesta with a video clip of Haddock delivering the line, not expecting much. In the meantime, she said, “Am I really meant to believe that you reside on this asteroid?”
The Bigelow hab did not give the impression of a home, so much as a spherical tool-shed. It measured about ten meters across. Fabric partitions walled off private compartments for sleeping, but there was no furniture in the hab apart from basic life-support equipment. The triple-stage airlock through which they’d entered contained an electrostatic scrubber, to make sure they brought no dust inside. Her phavatar’s olfactory sensors transmitted a reek similar to the smell of ripe kimchi, overlaid with air freshener. Magnetic clamps held tools and spare parts for the D/S bots. Wall screens displayed the ongoing excavation, as well as panoramas of the asteroid’s surface.
“Care for a cup of char?” Haddock said, while Anemone stuck a handful of drink pouches into the microwave. “Oh no, I forgot; ye’re a phavatar. And the real you is probably sitting comfortably on some palatial space station, enjoying the gravity and the high-O2 air, wi’ a cozy bunk and a real dinner awaiting ye at the end of the day.” He shook his head sadly. “Ye’ve no idea what it is to be alone in the solar system, despised by one and all, wi’ nowhere to lay your head. All we want is a place to call home, humble as it may be, where we can live in peace, troubling no one. And for this sin ye’d treat us like criminals—”
At this point Elfrida interrupted. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You aren’t settlers, any more than you’re pirates. Dude. Haddock, or whatever your name really is. You’re not fooling this chick.”
She smiled to take the sting out of her accusation, and all five of them shuddered. “Would you mind not doing that?” Coral fished a crumpled tablet out of her webbing, smoothed it out, and said, “Mirror.”
In the now-reflective surface, Elfrida saw a horrifyingspectre. Her collision with the wall had rearranged her phavatar’s face, leaving pink polyfoam and nanofiber muscles exposed by hanging shreds of fake skin. Her telescopic left eye stared from its bare plastisteel socket. She now looked less like an axe murderer than an axe murderer’s victim. Her grin was the final, awful touch.
She pawed fruitlessly at her hair, which was sticking out in all directions, and said, “Sorry.”
~Cosmetic damage? she subvocalized to the phavatar’s MI. ~This is a cosmetic disaster!
“As I said, I’m sorry,” she ploughed on. “But you’re not fooling anyone. You’re already known to us, as it happens. While we’ve been talking here, I queried our databanks …” Her query about Haddock’s ‘codfish’ quotation had turned up some interesting results. “Facial recognition and voice analysis put you with 99.9 percent certainty on 1856902 Alhambra, 738688 Duxi, and probably several other asteroids before that. I wasn’t involved in those missions personally, but my colleagues based on Hygiea were. Apparently, when you were operating in the outer Belt, you called yourself ‘Hook.’ And I do know that reference. Hook! was a twenty-first-century musical about pirates, by Walt Disney. However, the record makes it clear that you aren’t pirates. If anything, I guess you’re the solar system’s smallest pirate fan club.”
“Peter Pan was a novel by Sir James Matthew Barrie! Disney was a philistine,” said the child Kelp.
“Sure they’re all bloody philistines in the UN,” Haddock said. He pushed off from the wall he was holding onto. Anemone released the handful of drink pouches she had just taken from the microwave. Globules of hot tea escaped into the air. “You’re right,” Haddock said to Elfrida. “We’re not pirates. We don’t jack passing spaceships, or mine asteroids that ain’t ours. Billions of blistering blue barnacles! Who would bother mining a water-poor vestoid? You’d scarcely cover your costs. No, me beauty.” He drifted closer to the phavatar, holding a socket wrench in one hand. “We’re just construction workers, trying to earn a crust in the outer-space home-building industry.”
“You’re already wanted by the UN Occupational Health and Safety Agency on charges of illegal construction,” Elfrida said urgently. “Don’t make things worse for yourselves!”
A violent impact blacked out her optic sensors. The phavatar’s audio feed lasted a few seconds longer. The olfactory, a few seconds beyond that. By the time she lost the smell of body odor and kimchi, she was fighting the restraints that held her on the couch, pulling her headset off. She floated upright, gasping, in the golden evening light that poured through the windows of the U-Vesta telepresence center.
v.
“I need a drink,” Elfrida said, pulling off her coat.
She had spent the day filing paperwork on the 550363 Montego disaster. To be sure, a day on Vesta was only five and a half hours long, but that was still a lot of paperwork. She’d helped Petruzzelli—who was understandably outraged by the loss of her phavatar—prepare an application for compensation. She had also written a report for her supervisor back home. Her formal debrief was scheduled for tomorrow.
She had also decided to pay a visit to Dr. James, the head of the astrophysics program at U-Vesta.
But before tackling Dr. James, she needed to rest and recharge, so she’d come home.
UNVRP had rented an apartment for her in one of the best buildings in Branson Hills, a sprawl of habs climbing the slope north of Olbers Lake. While the newer habs were just that—expandable Bigelows, like headless snowmen squatting among the trees—Elfrida’s building dated back to the early days of the Vesta colony. Those first settlers had not contemplated the sacrifice of right angles for cost-efficiency. So her apartment had four walls. It had a ceiling. It had floors that did not give at every step. And it had doors that closed and locked, so you could shut out the world.
That sounded really good to Elfrida right now.
She dropped onto the ergoform couch. “I said I need a drink!” she shouted. “What are you, stupid?”
From the miniature kitchen came a grinding noise and a series of beeps.
“Oh God. Not again.”
Elfrida heaved herself off the couch and squelched in her dry-grip boots to the kitchen. Spilt breakfast cereal littered the counter. The beeps were coming from the corner behind the refrigerator. Elfrida got down on her hands and knees. Jammed into the corner, her housekeeping bot beeped at her. Its sucker-feet retracted and extended, fastening onto the floor and ripping free again—that was the noise she’d heard—as it tried to gain leverage to free itself. Its vacuum nozzle was stuck behind the fridge.
“Aw,” Elfrida said. “Did poor wittle bottikins try to vacuum up the spice rack again? I put it back there, you know, so you wouldn’t. My mom gave me that spice rack, and all the spices in it, because everything tastes like crap in micro-gee. But you’re just convinced, aren’t you, that nutmeg and turmeric are hazardous substances. Diddums.”
She jerked the maidbot out of the corner. The vacuum nozzle came free. It had a noticeable bulge near its tip. Maybe the bot had just been trying to vacuum up the spilt cereal. Feeling a bit guilty, she set it on the counter.
“Spit it out!”
The maidbot hiccuped. Out of its nozzle rolled a sphere the size of an eyeball.
“Hmm.”
Elfrida examined the sphere. It was pink. It had a hole through the middle. It had what seemed to be an ON button, but nothing happened when she pressed it.
“Maybe I owe you an apology, bot,” she said. “What is this? … Oh, right.” She raised her voice to an imperative pitch. “BOT COMMAND! Enable voice communication.”
“Dunno,” the maidbot said. “It’s a foreign object! It was on the floor!
I have to keep the floor clean!”
“Now I remember why I muted you. BOT COMMAND! Disable voice communication.”
The maidbot clattered at her with what seemed like pique, and began to vacuum up the cereal on the counter.
Elfrida fixed her own drink, a margarita flavored with chili pepper from her mother’s spice rack, and carried it back into the living-room. She sat on the couch and treated herself to a trip to Venus. After a while, she removed her stabilizer braces, although she knew she shouldn’t. The dang things were just so uncomfortable. Ahhh … that was better.
Headset in place, gel mask over her face, gel gloves on her hands, she wandered among the fig and olive trees on the shore of Venus’s warm, planet-girdling sea. Behind her, the Lakshmi Plateau reared against the blueberry-colored noon sky.
Post-terraforming, Venus was still an inhospitable world. A shallow, brine-saturated ocean covered 80% of its surface, and its continents were arid. Ferocious winds circled the planet. Only the polar regions were cool enough for mammalian life. The day remained long—the dispute about how long was still ongoing, but Elfrida had picked a best-guess setting of 40 sols. A day, then, was an Earth month. Seasons were nonexistent, due to the low obliquity of the planet’s spin axis, and most people lived underground, to escape the sun’s relentless glare (or, at night, the endless dark), as well as the hurricane-force winds.
But you could go outside. Without an EVA suit. Without gecko boots. Without stabilizer braces. You could walk on Cytherean rock, breathe Cytherean air, and irrigate your GMO fig and olive trees with Cytherean water piped from the local desalination plant. The Venus Remediation Project had achieved its goal of transforming the solar system’s problem child into a shirt-sleeve environment.
Elfrida picked a fig and sat down in the shelter of the rocks to watch the windjammers. These sailboats zipped back and forth from Ishtar to the southern continent of Aphrodite, making use of the very same gales that foiled air travel on Venus. They looked like giant butterflies skimming on the silver sea. She bit into the fig.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 28
