Cydney was warm from her walk by the time she reached VA headquarters, a low-slung green building with a lake view. The vegetable garden out front was the most ostentatious thing about the place.
“So, why did you try to sell the Arruntia crater to a corporation based on Ganymede?” she said to Jay Macdonald, the CFO of Virgin Atomic.
Macdonald’s round face turned a shade pinker. He hadn’t been expecting that question. She had landed the interview on the pretext of doing a piece about soycloud technology development. Her curveball had clearly hit him square in the goolies.
“No comment, Ms. Blaisze,” he said frostily.
“You should have known you’d run into opposition from the university. They don’t want a bunch of newbies moving in next door. It would degrade the cultural environment, and if VA had to provide life support for new colonists, it would divert important resources from U-Vesta’s educational mission.”
Cydney was quoting an email from Dean Garcia to the head of the U-Vesta financial department. Well, paraphrasing it. Garcia hadn’t said new colonists, she’d said a bunch of crazies who can’t survive without hand-holding. Of course, Garcia also had her own agenda.
“The university’s had its eye on Arruntia for ages. They want to build a satellite campus there. Why’d you try to sell it out from under them?”
Macdonald exhaled pointedly. “Ms. Blaisze, I was under the impression that you wanted to interview me about Virgin Atomic’s CSR policy.”
Yeah, like that wouldn’t lose me gigafans, Cydney thought. Snooze-a-minute. “I am,” she said. Beaming, she recrossed her legs. “Corporate social responsibility means consulting your biggest stakeholder before you build a new habitat next door, don’t you think?”
“We did consult the university,” Macdonald said. “The upshot was intense opposition to our proposal. Therefore, we dropped it. All this is a matter of public record.”
“Yes, but—”
“Besides, it was five years ago. Why is this news now?”
“Because it isn’t a matter of public record that your potential buyer at that time, the Haven Company, which was dissolved after its bid was rejected, was actually a front for another company called Five Dreams Incorporated, a venture capital outfit which is majority-owned by Empirical Solutions.”
Cydney sat back, smiling, as Macdonald absorbed this body blow. Empirical Solutions was a Chinese conglomerate. As bad as selling the Arruntia Crater to a supermajor would’ve been, from the university’s point of view, selling it to a Chinese supermajor would be infinitely worse.
It wasn’t that no one trusted the Chinese. They were equal partners with the UN in the peaceful exploitation of the solar system.
Except … no one did trust them.
After the Mars Incident, when the AIs of the Mars colony went rogue and slaughtered every human being on the planet, it had been the People’s Liberation Army Navy that went to investigate … and never came back. What had come back instead was the PLAN.
So—even though it wasn’t fair on ordinary Chinese companies—Jay Macdonald would not want it known that VA had been trying to sell a piece of Vesta to them.
He was so red in the face now that Cydney hoped there was a medibot standing by. “Ms. Blaisze, I can neither confirm nor deny what you’re saying, but if there is any truth to your remarks, that information would be confidential and protected by privacy law—”
“Oh no, it’s not,” Cydney said. “It’s all there on the internet. You just have to dig for it.”
Smiling, she sipped from the cup of sweet, milky tea that Macdonald had offered her before he knew why she was here. The teacups were special gadgets for use in microgee, with invisible lids that retracted at the approach of your lips.
“Ms. Blaisze, are you recording this conversation?”
“Oh, no,” Cydney lied. “This is just a casual chat.”
He peered closely at her, as if hoping to see whether her eyes were augmented. He was looking in the wrong place. Her microcamera was in her left earlobe, disguised as a pearl stud.
Macdonald’s eyes were pale blue, watery with alarm. Cydney suddenly felt sorry for him.
“Hey,” she said gently. “I wouldn’t vid you. I can see you’re, you know. That. P’b’d.” She gabbled the word pureblood, trying not to hurt his feelings. “It would be unethical to put vid of you out there.”
No pureblooded person ever wanted vid of them floating around, for the PLAN targeted purebloods with incomprehensible and relentless ferocity. It was highly unlikely they’d send a ninepack of toilet rolls to Vesta to hit one pureblooded corporate executive, through a 2-kilometer roof yet, but Cydney sympathized with the insecurity that all of Macdonald’s ilk must feel. She’d get Aidan and the team to blur his face before she uploaded this interview to her feed.
He slumped, grabbed his teacup and drank. “Yes. I’m pureblooded. I can trace my ancestry back to the sixteenth century. Dh'aindeoin co theireadh e!”
Cydney smiled uncomprehendingly.
“I appreciate your consideration, Ms. Blaisze. However—” the pale blue gaze suddenly hardened— “it appears you are recording.”
“Not!” Cydney yelped.
Macdonald made a complicated gesture at his computer screen and then flipped it around so she could see. It displayed a systems monitoring suite, which showed all the electronics drawing current in Macdonald’s office. There was Cydney’s BCI, powered by a glucose fuel cell. And there was her microcamera, piezoelectrically powered by her own movements.
“All right, I’m turning it off,” she said. Well, she’d already got the essential clip of Macdonald denying everything. “There! I wasn’t going to use that, anyway.”
“Glib i the tung is aye glaikit at the hert,” Macdonald said.
“Eh?”
“Given your profession, you ought to be aware that it’s illegal to transport any data off these premises that you didn’t have when you came in.”
“Fine! I’ll wipe it.” He wouldn’t be able to tell.
“We’ll have to confirm that.”
“You’ll have to take my word for it.” Cydney knew her privacy law. The inside of someone’s head was their territory, period. And earlobes counted.
“We’d prefer to run a scan,” Macdonald said. “Metadata only, of course.”
“No! I refuse.”
Macdonald’s eyes widened in their pouches of puffy skin. He was looking at his screen. “Well, well,” he said.
“I’m leaving,” Cydney said, jumping up. “Thanks for your time.”
“Just a moment, Ms. Blaisze. It looks as if you’ve got some rather … unusual programs stashed in there.”
“You have been scanning me!” Cydney shot a glance around the deluxe executive office. Given that Macdonald was not in the best of health, it made sense that there’d be a telemetry monitor running in here. If he had a cardiac implant or something, the monitor would also have the ability to read electronic data wirelessly. But she hadn’t thought they would have the gonads to run a scan on her, after she’d explicitly refused permission. “That’s illegal!”
“So is that data scraper program of yours.”
“Not if I don’t do anything with it.” Why was she even arguing with him? She bounced across the office towards the door.
“Ms. Blaisze, please, one moment! We’ll have to confirm that you haven’t in fact infiltrated our network.”
The truth was that she’d given it a try during their conversation, but as she might have expected, VA had better security than the U-Vesta dean’s office. Her scraper program had bounced off their wireless signal encryption. “I’ve got a reputation to protect. I wouldn’t do anything illegal,” she said. “Unlike some people.” She reached the door.
With a piercing hiss, a security phavatar thudded into the room and blocked her way. It was humanoid, in the sense that a mountain gorilla was humanoid. It kind of looked like a mountain gorilla. Seven feet tall. Wearing a red overall with the VA logo on its chest. A
nd gripping a PEPgun in one hairy fist.
Cydney stood her ground. “I’ve faced charging elephants,” she said to the security phavatar. “They were a lot scarier than you. I’m the daughter of a Xhosa chieftain. Those elephants? We ate their testicles.”
Macdonald looked up from his screen. “Elephants don’t have solid-state non-lethal laser weapons,” he pointed out.
Cydney swallowed.
The PEPgun, beloved of law enforcement and peacekeeping personnel, was non-lethal, all right. It used a laser-generated plasma pulse to cause pain so intense that people swallowed their own tongues just to make it stop.
The security phavatar stomped towards her, pneumatics hissing.
“If you mess with me, you’ll be sorry! I’ve got a feed with seven million registered viewers!”
“Only four million six hundred thousand and eighty-nine, now,” Macdonald said. “Your relocation to Vesta seems to have cost you a lot of fans. I don’t blame them. This place is boring. And we hope to keep it that way, despite the best efforts of your friends at the university.”
“Well, that’ll change when I splash your corporate misdeeds all over the solar system!” Cydney said, still backing up. She managed a weak giggle, and then she flung herself out of the window.
★
“They threatened me.” Cydney clutched handfuls of Big Bjorn’s fur. Her wet cheek rested on his lap. She was crying. “He c-c-called security. It was this big ugly phavatar with a PEPgun. It was going to s-s-shoot me/”
“It’s OK,” Bjorn said, patting her back. “It’s OK.”
“But I called their bluff. I mean, they didn’t have any right to detain me! So I tried to get past it. And it g-g-grabbed me and threw me out of the window!”
That wasn’t quite what had happened. But Cydney didn’t want to admit that she’d jumped out the window in a panic.
“You should sue them!” said Shoshanna.
That made Cydney stop crying. “I don’t think so. I couldn’t bear to relive the experience.” She was pretty sure that Virgin Atomic wouldn’t go after her. After all, she hadn’t infiltrated their network. But if she sued, they’d make an issue out of her data scraper program. Everyone knew that curators used gray-zone tools to get the news. The trick was not getting caught. If you did get caught, it was game over.
Besides, if VA released vid of her self-defenestration, she’d never be able to hold up her head again.
She sat up, dabbing her dirty knees through the rips in her thermal tights. She’d landed in the vegetable garden. That had been the worst part of the whole experience: doing a swan dive into the carrots, hurting her knees, and then having to flee on foot while everyone stared at her.
She’d come straight to Big Bjorn’s place, knowing she would find the gang here. Since the raid, they’d abandoned what they had called their ‘safe house,’ a.k.a. David Reid’s pad. Now they gathered at Bjorn’s place, halfway up a micro-gee-adapted hickory tree in the hills behind the Branson Habs.
Bjorn’s treehouse, built by Bjorn himself, was one of the coziest places Cydney had ever been in. Rain plinked on the sheet metal roof, but did not find its way in. The walls were rustic mosaics of scrap, which you could get lost in for hours, especially if you were vaping dope. Bjorn believed in bricolage as an alternative to recycling. He had carried off ergoforms from here and there, disabled their smart functionality, and crafted the resulting blocks of polyfoam into sprawlchairs with hand-carpentered wooden frames. The only drawback of his home was that it was not heated. But Bjorn’s own fur was warm and thick enough that Cydney felt as if she were snuggling up with a blanket.
She leaned against him, sniffling and wiping her eyes,. “I just wanted to find out if Virgin Atomic was involved with the James clique,” she said, referring to the astrophysics lab the way her friends did.
“Of course they are!” said Shoshanna. A spiky woman with green hair, Shoshanna believed that being spaceborn made you both special and smart. In her own case, she was wrong on both counts, Cydney believed. But Shoshanna’s boundless self-confidence had enabled her to step into the role of leader when David Reid was hospitalized. “They’re neck-deep in it with Dr. James! Whatever it is.”
“So I thought now they might be ready to distance themselves from him,” Cydney said. “I might have gotten a few clues about their Secret Project.”
“Well, did you?” Shoshanna said.
“I said I might have. I didn’t. Because they threatened me and then threw me out of a window!”
“Don’t cry,” Bjorn pleaded.
Cydney took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Well, now we know they’ve definitely got something to hide.”
“Metalfucking Secret Project,” Shoshanna said, her sharp chin in her hands, one skinny leg kicking rhythmically. “What kind of scam requires round-the-clock use of Ali Baba, and information security so tight that they don’t even back their data up on the university servers?”
“Hey,” said Win Khin, who was a sleek, androgynous phavatar. He kept his flesh-and-blood self in one of the life-support cubicles the department provided for phavatarists.
“Sorry,” Shoshanna said. “Metafucking Secret Project. What was it, or is it? I want to know what they were working on.”
“Well, we don’t really need to know, do we?” said a timid girl from the Transhumanist Studies program. “We can use Ali Baba as much as we like? I mean, we kind of won?”
“No, we didn’t,” Shoshanna said. “David’s in hospital, or have you forgotten? And Cydney just got tossed out of a window. They’re escalating this thing, because they’re afraid we’re getting close to the truth.”
“If only the astrophysics workstation hadn’t been damaged beyond repair,” sighed Cydney, who did not believe it had been. On the night of the raid, Shoshanna and some of her dodgier associates had carried the workstation off. Ever since, Cydney had been trying to find out where they’d taken it. She assumed they were trying to fix it, with no success. That would explain Shoshanna’s frustration.
“We have to step our resistance up,” Shoshanna said. “We can’t let them trample on our rights like this. I talked to David in hospital this FirstLight. He had a couple of ideas.”
“If you plan on breaking the law, count me out,” Cydney said.
“Oh, Cydney,” Shoshanna said. “We need you. Even if we find out the truth, what’ll happen? They’ll bury it. You’re the only one who can expose their crimes to the light of justice.”
“Not if I’m in jail, I can’t.”
“You won’t go to jail. None of us will. There are only five of those so-called peacekeepers, and the lay judge of Vesta is none other than Dean Garcia.”
“What about your girlfriend?” Win Khin said to Cydney. “Doesn’t she work for the UN?”
“Yes,” Cydney said. “The Space Corps. But she’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Y-yes.” Cydney’s throat tightened. This time, her distress was genuine. “Last night. She just vanished out of our apartment. She didn’t even leave me a note. She left her stabilizer braces!”
“Oh my God,” Shoshanna said. “Do you think they’ve hurt her?”
Cydney shook her head. “I checked with the STEM people. They’ve both gone. Her and that UNVRP guy she works with. They went off on some kind of mission for the geology lab.”
“Oh my God,” Shoshanna said again, with a different intonation. “They’re all in it together!”
“Not necessarily,” Cydney insisted. She didn’t want to believe that Elfrida could be involved with Dr. James’s Secret Project, could have been keeping that big of a story from her all this time. But the alternative interpretation was even worse. “Maybe they just went off together.” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I should have guessed. The amount of time they spend together, just the two of them. I did think it was kind of suspicious, but she always insisted there was nothing going on.”
“Her … and that guy?”
Cydne
y nodded violently. “Mendoza. A data analyst.”
“Oh Cydney, really? He’s male.”
“Why would that stop her? He’s not totally unattractive. I think his first name’s John. John!” She lost control of her emotions and hid her face in Bjorn’s shoulder, shaking with sobs of grief and betrayal.
Win Khin laid a cool chrome hand on her ankle. “Oh, Cydney. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” Shoshanna said. “That majorly sucks.” For once, she sounded sincere. She tried to pull Cydney into a hug, but Cydney clung to Bjorn as if he were a teddy bear.
Bjorn was in fact a bear, in his own mind. One of the disunified tribe known as bestialists, he had spent all his money on surgery that bulked him up, grew shaggy brown fur all over his body, and reshaped his face into lines that echoed a favorite childhood toy of Cydney’s called Love-A-Lot Bear. Unlike some bestialists, Bjorn had no interest in sex with actual female bears. He just wanted to live in a tree (despite the fact that real bears lived in dens), eat out of the garbage, and shamble around the woods thinking bearish thoughts. Life in microgee was kind to his frame, whose ursine padding would have overly stressed his skeleton in stronger gravities. He was a student at the university, and had been for the past fifteen years, with no prospect of graduation. He was the gentlest person Cydney had ever met.
He patted her shoulders with hairy, blunt-clawed fingers, murmuring, “It’s OK. I know it hurts. But it’s gonna be OK.”
“At least you’ve got friends,” Shoshanna said. “We’ll be here for you no matter what.”
Cydney reached out blindly for Shoshanna’s hand and squeezed it.
xiii.
At the same time, 700 kilometers away, Elfrida and Mendoza were sitting in their rover, contemplating the ringrail canyon. They had driven away from the refinery for two Vestan days, paralleling the graben. Mendoza had a theory that they would be able to cross over to the southern hemisphere on the far side of the protoplanet, where the walls of the graben were supposedly lower.
Lower turned out to be relative.
“There’s no way we’re getting the rover down there,” Elfrida said.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 35
