Vlajkovic shook his head. “The Phase Five ramp is just an excuse to get rid of us.”
Gates had come after them. Vlajkovic went up to him and lifted Bette out of her snugglepack.
“Look at her. Look at her.” He held Bette up by the armpits. She woke up and started to cry. “Now do you understand?”
Elfrida looked at the fair-haired toddler. She looked at Vlajkovic’s friends, sitting on the lab steps. It was so dark in here that she never had looked closely at them before. Now she saw a sameness to their faces. All of them were melanin-challenged, which was the polite way of saying they all had European ancestry.
“You’re purebloods,” she said.
Gates snatched the screaming Bette away from Vlajkovic. “Oh, it’s worse than that,” he said. “We’re Americans.”
★
“I don’t understand,” Elfrida said.
“What don’t you understand?” Gates said.
“How come? I mean, how come you’re purebloods?” This was not something people talked about. She didn’t know how to talk about it.
“Let’s start with a bit of history,” Gates said. “Once upon a time, the United States was a nation of immigrants. All races, all colors. But they didn’t always get along. For instance, there was a period when the melanin-challenged portion of the population enslaved the rest.”
“Whoa. That’s awful.”
“Yeah. The country got past that, but the tensions never went away. Economic inequality perpetrated racial segregation, and it turned out to be really sticky. Even in the twenty-second century, the richest 0.01% of the country looked like us.”
Vlajkovic spread his hands. They were still sitting on the steps of the lab. “And that’s what we are.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re descended from the richest Americans of the twenty-second century.” He flicked rat droppings off the step where Bette was crawling. “Big comedown, huh? Space will do that to you: take everything you’ve got, and ask for more.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“When UNVRP first set up here, they had no budget and no staff,” Gates said. “The cheapest solution was to hire locally. So, we’re descended from the people that Wrightstuff, Inc. palmed off on their charity project, as they saw UNVRP at the time. They didn’t anticipate Charles K. Pope. But as Pope secured more and more funding, and developed the Venus Project to its current scale, he kept on hiring from Wrightstuff. It was a condition of the agreement.”
“So we’re the unemployable descendants of the ultrarich,” Vlajkovic cackled. “And they wonder why this community is a mess.”
Elfrida still had questions, but she wasn’t sure where to start asking them. “Wow,” she said. “I’m … I don’t know. Sorry?”
“Are you being sarcastic?” Vlajkovic said. “You fucking dare? We’re about to be evacuated because we’re purebloods. A circumstance over which we have zero control.”
Gates put a hand on his arm. “Calm down, Mike.”
“It’s true,” Vlajkovic said. “The execs are pretending it’s nothing to do with our heritage. But you, Goto—you don’t get to pretend anymore.”
Elfrida shook her head. “I can’t believe it. UNVRP wouldn’t do that.”
But she knew that hiring directors were running scared after the 4 Vesta calamity. The PLAN targeted purebloods, a ‘policy’ that the Heidegger program’s rampage on 4 Vesta had made gruesomely visible. The private sector was now desperately trying to filter purebloods out of their space-based workforces, in hopes that would save them from being attacked. She just hadn’t thought the UN would ever stoop so low. “There are anti-discrimination laws,” she said.
“Get a fucking clue,” Vlajkovic said.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Elfrida said wearily. She stared at the children sitting on the ground in front of the big screen. They weren’t all pale-skinned. “Just tell me, how many of you are purebloods, exactly?”
“Seventy, eighty percent?”
“Eighty percent,” Elfrida echoed. The ratio of purebloods in the overall population was one in five.
“But we’re a package deal,” said a lab worker, leaning over to join the conversation. He obviously had a multiracial heritage, but he shared the ‘sameness’ Elfrida had noticed in the others. “How’re they going to evict the purebloods selectively? Hello, ethnic-discrimination lawsuits.”
“Maybe the President doesn’t approve,” Elfrida said. “And parachuting Dr. Hasselblatter into the race is her way of stopping it.”
“Could be,” Vlajkovic said, shrugging. “Doesn’t change the fact his campaign is pure sci-fi.”
The children in front of the screen squealed in excitement.
Elfrida craned to see what they were looking at. A rollercoaster plunged around the domes of the city on rails. The logo on the bonnet of the first car depicted the words MERCURY, INC. Elfrida could see that to a kid raised in an underground hab, that looked like it would be the most fun thing ever.
“On the other hand,” Vlajkovic said thoughtfully.
Now the screen showed people flying around on jet-powered broomsticks.
“Quidditch! Quidditch!” the children screamed.
“There are a lot of kids in this hab,” Vlajkovic observed.
“Yeah,” Gates said. “And even more in Mt. Gotham.”
“And the NEOs,” someone else said.
“Shame they can’t vote,” Elfrida said.
“Yeah, they can.” Vlajkovic grinned. “Minimum voting age is six.”
★
“Wheeee!”
“Pull in your legs, ma’am!”
Elfrida balled herself up. Bouncing in Mercury’s low gravity, she rolled down a steep slope at the eastern edge of Borealis Planitia. “Wheeee!” she exclaimed again. The three children cartwheeled ahead of her, all four legs spread and locked like spokes. Their whirling feet churned up the top layer of regolith. A contrail of pulverized rock clouds trailed behind them.
At the bottom of the slope, they righted themselves and began running again. Elfrida stretched into a gallop, all four legs leaving the ground at once. She outdistanced the children. “Come on, you guys,” she urged them. “Can’t catch me!”
“Ma’am, you’re not a very credible adult, are you?” said Boris Clinton, who was eleven.
“If I had a tongue,” Elfrida said, “I’d stick it out at you.”
They were all in suits. In the sense of phavatars. The vinge-classes might look like monsters from a cheap horror vid, but they were very practical for surface operations. They could go as fast as 50 km/h, once you got the hang of running on four legs. And of course, they never got tired.
“You see, we’re used to this,” Jake said. A net sack of cargo flapped under his thorax. He held it on with his clamps—a vestigial pair of middle legs—as they climbed the next hill. Rivulets of shale streamed from their crampons. Their headlamps lanced across the pitted rock.
“But this is seriously fun,” Elfrida said. “It’s kind of like riding a rollercoaster. You know, like the one we’re going to build?”
“For the tourists,” Boris said.
“And for you guys, too. Aren’t you excited about that? And the quidditch league, and the herds of robot bison …”
“That stuff is for kids,” said Lena Musk, who was ten.
They’ve been forced to grow up too fast, Elfrida thought sadly. “OK, I’m going to try that cartwheeling thing. I never could turn a cartwheel in real life. Yee-ha!”
The children giggled. Elfrida lost control and cartwheeled diagonally across the slope. She crashed into a small crater, and Boris laughed out loud.
She made much of her ruffled dignity, rubbing non-existent bruises. “What are you looking forward to, then?” she asked.
“Getting real jobs,” Lena said.
“Oh yeah? What do you want to be?”
“I want to be a waitress. I’ll have a uniform with a nametag, and we’ll have tables, and al
l the tourists will come to eat at my restaurant! We’ll serve spinach and broccoli.”
“Yum yum,” Boris said. “I’m going to eat allll the broccoli!”
This was childhood in space, Elfrida thought. Romping over Mercury in three-million-spider suits, while yearning to sit at a table and eat vegetables.
What these kids wanted most of all—what Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign implicitly promised them—was normality.
“Jake! Over there!” Boris said.
There was a moment of oddly tense silence.
“I definitely saw something,” Boris said.
Jake slowed down and ran back the way they’d come. They all followed. Their headlamps picked out nothing unusual that Elfrida could see. Gray rock, blancmanged by micro-impacts. This particular area had never been strip-mined. Judging by the undisturbed dust, it had never even been traversed by humans, or robots, before.
“There,” Boris said.
“Good eyes,” Jake said. His drill-fanged head turned towards Elfrida, an automatic human gesture that Elfrida interpreted as uncertainty. “I’ll be back in a minute, ma’am.”
“What’s he doing?” Elfrida said, watching him spider away.
“Just checking out the rocks,” Boris said.
“What did you see?”
Neither Boris nor Lena answered. Jake’s phavatar came back, middle legs refastening the edges of his cargo net. “OK, let’s go.”
After a few minutes of running in silence, Boris wheedled, “Was there anything there, Jake?”
“We haven’t tested it yet,” Jake snapped.
“Oh, kids,” Elfrida said. “Stop being so mysterious. What’d you find? Palladium? Diamonds?”
Lena said, “Laughing myself sick! There aren’t any platinum-group metals on Mercury. As for diamonds? Who’d bother to pick those up? They’re cheaper than water.”
This was true. The abundance in the asteroid belt of diamonds, and for that matter platinum-group metals, had set a low floor under the market. The hard-currency action was now in the rarest of rare earths, and other elements such as helium-3, which were not to be found on Mercury, either.
“What is it, then?” Elfrida said. She folded her arms, which were her front legs, and crashed onto her chin. “Ow!”
“I thought you were a professional, ma’am,” Boris giggled.
Elfrida did not play up her klutziness this time. She tried for a severe tone. “Kids, I’m not going to let this go. If you’re doing anything that might hurt Dr. H.’s campaign ...”
“It’s not wrong, and our parents know about it!” Boris said.
“Fine. See for yourself.” Jake stopped. He rooted in his cargo net and took out a small demron sack, which he tossed to Elfrida. It was heavy. “Your suit has spectrographic imaging functionality. Turn it on. You’ll have to open the sack. It’s scan-proof.”
Elfrida quizzed her phavatar’s MI assistant. ~Spectrographic imaging functionality?
~Enabling now, the mechanical intelligence answered.
Her field of vision turned into a mosaic of false color. Her companions were webs of aquamarine fleximinium. The landscape remained uniform, albeit now green. ~Calcium, magnesium, aluminum, the MI identified the variegations in the rocks. ~There is very little iron here. It is concentrated in the regions of ancient lava flows.
Elfrida opened the sample sack.
The rocks inside sparkled with golden flecks.
~Helium-3, the MI said.
~SUIT COMMAND: Cancel spectrographic imaging view.
“I thought there wasn’t any He3 on Mercury,” she said to the children.
“There isn’t much,” Jake said. “It’s deposited by the solar wind, and we’ve got a magnetosphere that keeps it out. But the magnetosphere is leaky. When magnetic fields carried by the solar wind link up with ours, they create magnetic tornadoes. And you know how tornadoes work, right? They’re flux tubes that allow the solar wind to reach the surface. They can be stable for ages. Long enough for deposits of He3 to build up on the surface. So, we’re always on the lookout for those.”
“About how much would be in a deposit like this?”
“Maybe 250 grams.”
Elfrida relaxed. It wasn’t much. Luna produced 50 kilograms annually of the rare element used system-wide in nuclear fusion drives and reactors.
“But lunar production is slowing,” Boris added. “They’ve completely strip-mined the equator. So the price is going up.”
“So,” Jake said, “we’ve flagged that deposit, and we’re sending a blasting bot and our No. 2 dragline excavator to pick it up.”
“And how do you get it off-planet?”
Jake waved his phavatar’s middle legs in a shrug. “You’d have to ask Dad.”
“I will,” Elfrida said grimly.
Now I know why he wants to take over the hab … and the mining operation, she thought. He’s got no intention of mining iron for the Phase Five Ramp. He wants the He3.
“Don’t any of the majors know about these He3 deposits?” she asked.
“Well, I guess they do,” Jake said. “They pick the stuff up and sell it just like we do. I guess.”
He sounded uncertain. Boris said darkly, “My mom says it’s a cartel.”
He clearly did not know what a cartel was. But Elfrida could guess what his mom’s theory was. Luna’s near-monopoly on helium-3 (the only other known deposits were on asteroids, and were relatively tiny) gave its producers political as well as economic power. And those producers were by and large the same resource companies that operated on Mercury. They were probably passing off any He3 mined on Mercury as Lunar product, both to keep prices up and to avoid an unseemly scramble for Mercurian real estate.
Elfrida had been researching Mercury’s sovereignty issues. There was no formal agreement on who should, could, or did own the planet. Whereas Luna had long ago declared independence as a state within the UN, Wrightstuff, Inc.’s attempt to pull off the same trick on Mercury had flopped. A bunch of other companies had moved in and set up their own mining operations, with Wrightstuff, Inc. powerless to stop them. Nowadays, harmony rested on the division of the planet into mining territories—a demarcation that had no more legal basis than a gentlemen’s agreement.
Should the existence of helium-3 on Mercury be made public, the status quo could collapse in the blink of an eye. Small-fry pirates would descend from all over the system. It would be chaos.
“Don’t worry,” Elfrida said to the children. “My lips are zipped.”
“Are we there yet?” Lena whined.
“Nope,” Jake said. “Why don’t you two log out for a while, let your assistants take over? It’s silly for us all to be here.”
After running for a couple more hours, they reached the top of one of Mercury’s lobate scarps: vertical precipices heaved up by the primordial process of cooling and shrinking. This one was named the Rowling Scarp. In the blackness 2km below, blue flames flared, their tops snapping off and dancing independently.
~Try infrared, Elfrida’s MI assistant advised.
~Wow!
The suit’s infrared vision revealed a mobile mine that made the UNVRP operation look like a hobby kit. Machines the size of spaceships trudged along the foot of the scarp, sucking up blast debris and feeding it into a vacuum smelter—the source of the unearthly flames.
“We’ve got a smelter, too,” Boris said. “But it’s not as big as that.”
“What’s that over there? It looks like a factory.”
“It is one. It makes refrigerators.”
“No,” Lena said. “Toasters.”
“It makes everything,” Jake said.
Elfrida’s assistant informed her that this was a white goods fab operated by Danggood Universal, one of the smaller players on Mercury. In an era when 3D printers could fabricate human organs, never mind consumer durables, high material prices on Earth meant that it was still cheaper to print these things (refrigerators and toasters, not human organs) on Mercury, a
ttach solar sails to them, and send them winging back to Earth. Red tape and changing mores had killed manufacturing on humanity’s home planet. Heavy industry was now seen as disgusting, raising the cost of regulatory compliance to the point that it made more sense to operate on Mercury.
“They shoot the stuff into orbit from here,” Jake said. “We might see a launch if we hang around long enough.”
“Y’know, on Earth,” Elfrida said, “people sometimes wonder why stuff they ordered takes so long to arrive. Now I know. It’s because someone miscalculated the launch trajectory from Mercury.”
“Really?”
“I’m just kidding. They do final assembly on Earth. You can order whatever and it arrives the same day.”
“Really?” the children repeated, longingly. Elfrida felt bad for making them envious.
It was time to go to work. Jake took a length of slithery fabric out of his cargo net. Each holding one corner, they unfolded it over the edge of the scarp. They splarted down the top corners. Boris and Lena then leaned over the edge to shoot more splart at the bottom corners, sticking the banner to the rock.
They shone their phavatars’ headlamps down at their handiwork.
The banner read: VOTE FOR ABDULLAH HASSELBLATTER! MOAR ART.
“I hope this works,” Elfrida said.
“It’ll work,” Jake said.
“I’m just wondering if this is really the best way to use our resources.”
“Why, what would you have done, ma’am?”
“Oh, probably slapped together a sim and used profile-crawling software to offer it to likely voters.”
“You’re so old-school!” Lena jeered. “You have to get physical with these people. It’s the only way to make them notice you.”
“I just wonder if anyone’s going to see these,” Elfrida pondered, as they jogged along the scarp to hang another banner ahead of the Danggood Universal operation.
“It doesn’t matter if anyone sees them,” Jake said. “I mean, of course they will. Their sats can see us right now. But the point is that we went to all this trouble, so they know how much we care.”
By the time they finished splarting up their banners, satellite images had already flashed around the solar system. The images, at first transient morsels of social media fodder, gained millions of views when they were joined by images of a fight between Elfrida’s crew and another gang of phavatars who were splarting up their own banners on the same scarp. Despite Elfrida’s reservations about the tactic, it had already been copied by Dr. Hasselblatter’s rivals for the directorship.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 71
