The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series

by Felix R. Savage

  “Ellie! Ellieeee! I’m ho-ome!”

  Elfrida’s jaw clenched. With deliberate slowness, she exited the immersion environment. The fig in her hand dematerialized. The Cytherean landscape vanished, to be replaced by the log-out screen. She spat out her gel tongue-tab, took her mask and gloves off, and removed her headset.

  Cydney Blaisze, Elfrida’s girlfriend, stood in front of the couch, bouncing up and down impatiently on bare feet. “Put that away. Let’s go out! I’m so glad you’re home! I didn’t expect you to be back yet. I actually just came back to change. Do you think I should wear this? Or this?” She held up two jumpsuits. One was a retro transistor print, the other was solid pink with a snake twining up one leg and down the other. “I’m kind of favoring the pink,” Cydney went on.

  Her stream-of-consciousness chatter had buried the question of Elfrida’s early return several sentences back, so Elfrida didn’t have to explain it, even if she’d wanted to. “You’ll be cold in either of them,” she said. The phantom taste of fig lingered in her mouth.

  “I’ll wear my coat, of course. It is totally freezing out there! Facilities Management is so cheap. But if I wear the pink, there’s an accessory problem. I mean, none of my scarves go with it. I suppose I could do a necklace. The stainless steel choker might work. But it’s so 2286. I was planning to recycle it, but it’s handmade, and I hate doing that. It just seems wrong.”

  Cydney bounced into the bedroom. Elfrida packed her immersion kit into its case.

  The apartment seemed brighter now that Cydney was here, and it wasn’t just because Cydney had switched on the lights. Cydney’s Chanel No.666 perfume perked up the flat air. Even the boring black walls seemed stylish, not oppressive, when they were serving as a backdrop for Cydney’s gazelle-like form.

  Cydney came from a more elite background than Elfrida. She’d been born in Johannesburg and grown up in another gated community on the Cape. She was half Xhosa, a quarter Afrikaaner and a quarter Anglomutt, not that you’d ever guess from her milky-coffee skin, slightly oversized green eyes, and silky blond hair—all courtesy of pre-birth genetic tweaking. She had got her start in the media thanks to her father’s contacts in the Xhosaland government.

  She bounced back into the living-room, stark naked except for a necklace. “Look what I found! Remember when you gave me this?”

  Elfrida did. It was when they’d only been dating a month. They had met on Earth, when Elfrida had been home recuperating after the 11073 Galapagos incident. Well, technically, they’d met on the net, when Cydney interviewed Elfrida about her amazing survival story. After Elfrida’s returned to Earth, Cydney had taken her out to lunch to thank her for the interview. They’d hit it off, and things had just kind of evolved.

  “We were on that gondola in SoHo,” Cydney reminisced. “I thought the trip was a disaster. I thought you hated me. I was thinking, I shouldn’t have asked her to come to New York, we’ve only just met … and then you gave me this.”

  She fingered the necklace, which was a string of ten beads representing the consensus number of Sol’s planets. The Venus bead was blueberry enamel, with sand-colored continents, representing UNVRP’s vision of how the planet would one day look. In fact, the necklace came from UNVRP’s public-relations department, as did the immersion environment Elfrida had been simming. The necklace wasn’t just a freebie like the software, though. It had cost Elfrida a packet.

  “You said, remember? You said, let’s be monogamous.” Cydney looked up, her eyes soft. An uncertain smile flickered on her lips.

  Elfrida pushed off the couch and kissed her. She suddenly felt blessedly charitable towards Cydney again, and that wasn’t anything to do with the fact that Cydney was naked. Absolutely not.

  “Oooh … oh … don’t! I mean, do, but not right this second. We’ve got to go out.” Cydney twisted away. “Everyone’s waiting for me. I mean, us. You are coming, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” Elfrida said. “I was only going to stay in and work on my farm, anyway.”

  “You mean on Venus? Honestly, Ellie, that’s such a … never mind.”

  “No, come on. Such a what? What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing. Really.”

  “No, what?”

  Cydney put on her underwear and climbed into the pink jumpsuit. Elfrida folded her arms. She hated that she was so touchy, so quick to pick a fight. But she had a good excuse today. And Cydney didn’t even want to hear about that. Hadn’t even bothered to ask why she was home early.

  Cydney said, “I was just going to say that you spend a lot of time in that immersion environment, when you could be, you know. Living. Talking to people, hanging out, having fun.”

  Elfrida bit back the comeback that popped into her mind—Are you aware that some of us have jobs? But that would open up another can of worms that she didn’t want to get into. Besides, Cydney had a point. It was loserish to hang out in an immersion environment. She used to be one of those who looked down on gamers and sim addicts. She didn’t want to turn into one.

  She knew she’d been badly affected by the 11073 Galapagos incident. Therapy had covered the cracks, but they were still there. Her short-temperedness, the way she was pushing Cydney away—she wanted to blame Vesta and/or her job, but she knew she was the problem. She had refused to take meds, but she was using the Homestead Venus sim to block out the world instead.

  “OK,” she said. “Let the good times roll. I’m just going to put on my stabilizer braces.”

  vi.

  The Virgin Café was a Vesta landmark, a quarter-acre of red and white booths with robot spiders crawling through buckysilk cobwebs on the ceiling. It had an infrared heating system which targeted human bodies, keeping them toasty, while their breath clouded white. Its name referred not only to the classical Roman origins of 4 Vesta’s moniker, but also to the private aerospace company that had spearheaded Vesta’s colonization.

  As Cydney had promised, ‘everyone’ was there—everyone being Cydney’s friends from the university. Elfrida connected to the café’s wifi and blinked up ID bubbles for them all, so she wouldn’t get their names wrong. Most of them had customized their public profiles. Quirky mascots, runes, and animations overlaid the tattooed and augmented bodies lounging in the darkened café.

  Cydney ordered an espresso martini. Elfrida asked for a Colorado Bulldog, in keeping with her resolution to be sociable.

  It wasn’t easy, though. She didn’t know any of these people. They all came from the Humanities department, which was permanently at war with the STEM department over supercomputer access, salaries, grants, and who had said what to whom at the latest faculty meeting.

  “What are you studying?” Elfrida uninspiredly asked the man beside her, whose lower-body stabilizer braces kept snagging on hers—they were crammed into the booth. She knew from his profile that he was an PHCTBS Studies Ph.D candidate named David Reid, but it was good manners to pretend you weren’t peeking.

  “Do you really want to know?” he said.

  “Yes, I’m curious.” Reid was a cyborg. She knew that not only because it was in his profile, but because his prosthetic left arm didn’t even pretend to be real. It was transparent, so she could see the actuators and nanofiber muscles flexing inside.

  “I’m researching the lived experiences of gimps in micro-gravity environments.” He smiled at her as if he’d just won an argument. “We’ve reclaimed the word gimp to distinguish congenitally disadvantaged individuals from the cyborg community, but I’m treating both communities as a single population for purposes of statistical analysis.” He reached across her with his artificial arm to grab her empty glass. “Another?”

  “I guess, yeah.” This would be her third drink, counting the margarita she’d had at home, and alcohol always hit her harder in micro-gee, but she felt like she needed it.

  “Yo! Another Colorado Bulldog over here! … So, you’re Cydney’s girlfriend?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re th
e one who works for the Venus Project.”

  “The Venus Remediation Project, yes.”

  “Remediation. That’s pretty Orwellian, wouldn’t you say? It presupposes that there’s something there to be remediated.”

  “Well, there is. Temperatures up to 900 degrees Celsius, a solar day that’s 242.5 sols long, and about 70 bars of excess CO2. We’ve already ablated a fifth of the atmosphere, but as you can tell from those figures, the place still needs work.” Do not get into an argument with this guy, Elfrida told herself. That’s what he wants. She had had this argument way too many times. There was a lot of public opposition to UNVRP, and it paradoxically seemed to be increasing at the same time as UNVRP restructured its asteroid capture program. Her drink arrived, brought by a robot spider that crawled across the ceiling and lowered its offering on a strand of buckysilk.

  “You ought to talk to some of my friends in Belter Studies,” Reid said. “They’d tell you that human beings don’t need planets to live fulfilled lives. To assume otherwise is to devalue spaceborn physiology and experiences. Hell, Cydney’s in Belter Studies, isn’t she? I guess maybe she doesn’t talk to you about her research. Here, have this.” Elfrida flinched as a volley of links came flying from his ID bubble to her inbox. “Plenty of data there to get you started.”

  He turned away and began talking to the person on his other side.

  Elfrida gritted her teeth. She looked around the café for allies. At this time—FirstDark, as the Vestans called it—most people took a break from work or studies. Vesta’s rotation period was 5.342 hours. Conveniently, five of these periods added up to a manageable 26-hour sol, giving the Bellicia ecohood a long ‘day’ punctuated by two little ‘nights.’ FirstDark corresponded to lunchtime. The café was crowded, but Elfrida didn’t see anyone she knew.

  She finished her second Colorado Bulldog, rolling up the pouch from the bottom to get the last drops out, and rose. Passing behind Cydney, she touched her on the shoulder. “See you at home.”

  “You’re leaving? Oh, come on! Was David being an asshole? He is an asshole. I could see you doing that face, your I’m-really-pissed-off-but-I’m-not-going-to-say-anything face. Here, sit beside me. I miss you, baby,” Cydney cooed, shifting emotional registers in nothing flat, the way she used to do on her popular feed, cydneyblaisze.cloud.

  Elfrida rubbed the place between her shoulderblades where the straps of her stabilizer braces overlapped and itched. The café was crowded. People were table-hopping, literally bouncing over the tables, chattering and laughing. There seemed to be a buzz in the air.

  Cydney grew peevish at Elfrida’s failure to respond. “You don’t have to like my friends. But can’t you at least try to understand their point of view? They’re not bad people. The thing is, you can only push people so far before they push back.”

  Was something going on? She could almost smell the excitement in the air.

  A text popped up on her contacts—Cydney taking their one-sided discussion private. “I relocated from Earth to the Belt for you. Is it too much to ask you to spend a couple of hours having a drink with me? I guess it is.”

  Elfrida’s head snapped sideways as if she’d been slapped. The text moved with her, staying put in the middle of her field of vision. Guilt skewered her. Cydney had never before admitted in as many words that she’d moved to Vesta for Elfrida. It had always been “a new direction in my career” or “intellectual enrichment” or “broadening my horizons.” But as the months passed, and Cydney made friends and got involved in campus life, Elfrida had allowed herself to think that maybe Cydney really had come to the middle of nowhere to study cultural divergence in space-based societies (the official name for what everyone at the university called ‘Belter Studies’).

  But here was the unvarnished truth: Cydney had made a huge sacrifice for Elfrida. Her feed had slid way down in the rankings. And Elfrida was reciprocating by being a grumpy bitch who couldn’t even make a sincere effort to get along with Cydney’s friends.

  Clearly, the decent thing to do was to apologize.

  But she had grievances of her own. “You think I’m leaving because your friends annoy me?” she transmitted, typing as fast as she could on the gaze-tracking keyboard interface of her contacts. “Sorry to deprive you of melodrama. I’ve actually got stuff to do.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Work! As you would have known if you’d bothered to ask me how my day was, or why I got home early, or any of that stuff couples normally ask each other. But no. You didn’t even notice I was upset. Honestly, I sometimes wonder why we even bother.”

  Cydney’s eyes widened in shock as she received the last words. Elfrida felt a mean stab of satisfaction. She trudged out of the café.

  By the time she got outside, she was already regretting what she’d said. But Cydney didn’t come after her, and Elfrida was damned if she’d go back and apologize.

  Apart from anything else, she did have to go see Dr. James. Might as well get it over with.

  ★

  “Come on in,” Dr. Eliezer James, head of the U-Vesta astrophysics department, called through the open door of his office. “Nice to see you, Ms. Goto. How’s everything going?”

  His friendly greeting took the wind out of Elfrida’s sails. Maybe he really didn’t know anything. Still, she was determined to have it out with him.

  She sank into the ergoform he indicated, feeling the knee joints of her stabilizer braces snag on the holey fabric cover. “To be honest, things aren’t going great,” she said. “I’ve filed a report with my supervisor, but I thought you should know, too. I had a phavatar destroyed today. It was assaulted by illegal construction workers on one of the asteroids you found for us.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “It was completely totaled. I was logged in and experiencing the real-time sensory feed at the time of the assault. That’s not a nice experience.”

  Dr. James’s brow furrowed. “As I said, I’m very sorry. If there’s anything I can do … Would you like a coffee? I was just making some.”

  “Thanks,” Elfrida said. Her head was spinning from the Colorado Bulldogs and her climb up to Dr. James’s office on the twentieth floor of the STEM building. Even the tallest buildings in the Bellicia ecohood lacked stairs. They were unneeded when everyone weighed about four pounds. Instead, the STEM building had a zipshaft which you could glide up by kicking off, as if you were riding a vertical scooter. But stabilizer braces made it a real workout. Which Elfrida needed, admittedly. She wondered how Dr. James managed.

  The astrophysics professor stalked from his desk to the table that held a coffee-maker as well as assorted scientific gear. His prosthetic legs gave him a bobbing gait like a chicken’s. These were functional, not cosmetic prostheses, skeletal under his slacks. His knees bent the wrong way for a human being. His right sleeve also hung in folds over a prosthesis that ended in a split hook.

  Watching him insert coffee pods into the machine with his left hand, while gripping the machine with his hook, Elfrida said, “I was just talking to a guy in, uh, Gimp Studies. That’s what they call it, apparently.”

  “I know. Bunch of slebs, aren’t they?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If it’s young Mr. Reid you’re speaking of, his family can afford to give him a post-grad education. In the asteroid belt. And what does he do, he chops off his own arm. Oh yes, that’s what cyborgism is: they amputate their own limbs and then spend the rest of their lives asking themselves what it means. Not at all the same as being born with only one limb because the Last Caliph bombarded your place of birth with defoliant chemicals a half-century before you came along. That’s why I don’t call myself a cyborg; they’ve devalued the word.”

  The coffee-maker released aromatic steam. Hot black liquid began to drip into the two attached pouches.

  “Ah, don’t listen to me,” Dr. James said with a grin. “I’m just being a curmudgeon.”

  Elfrida laughed stiffly. S
he’d been hoping to rule out any connection between Dr. James and the Humanities crowd, and he certainly sounded as if he had no time for them. But maybe that was just what he wanted her to think.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking a pouch of coffee. “Well, the reason I’m here is because I wanted to talk about that asteroid.”

  “Which one?”

  “550363 Montego. Where I lost a phavatar today. Where a gang of unlicensed construction workers is, or was, building a habitat for the purpose of facilitating illegal settlement.”

  “Shocking.”

  “Not really. We know this kind of thing goes on. And this isn’t even the first run-in we’ve had with these guys. But my point is that this makes thirty-eight out of forty-one asteroids that we’ve identified as candidates, based on your survey data, and subsequently investigated, only to find squatters already there.” She felt relieved to have got that sentence out without tripping over her tongue. “The only difference this time is that we caught them in the act. So—”

  “Ms. Goto.” Dr. James’s voice was suddenly cool. “Am I missing something? I don’t understand how this has anything to do with the U-Vesta Asteroid Survey.”

  “The astrodata comes from your office.”

  “And we make no guarantees that the rocks we find are or will be uninhabited. Our survey doesn’t go to that level of granularity.”

  “Oh, come on! I know you’ve got a gamma ray telescope. You’ve got infrared, ultraviolet, radio, radar, X-ray, the works. This department is the best-funded in the university. It’s the reason the university exists. So don’t tell me you can’t get that level of granularity. You can probably see squatters picking their noses on rocks half a million klicks out. You should definitely be able to see their emissions. But all you give us is radar data and spectroscopy analysis.” Her voice shook. She was no good at confrontation. But there was no one else to do this within a million kilometers. “Not only that, I believe you’re deliberately filtering the data before you hand it over. You’re giving us rocks that you know to be inhabited, because you’re ideologically opposed to the aims of the Venus Remediation Program.”