“Stop that,” he yelled at Junior, who was giving the campaign staffers a hard time.
“Sir, if I can ask, where did Junior come from?”
“A woman, of course. You can buy them. Like everything else in this solar system.”
Elfrida held onto her anger by her fingernails. “We had a great campaign,” she said. “It’s a shame.”
“Oh, go away, Goto.”
Elfrida left the suite. She spotted Cydney gossiping on the L1 mezzanine, and stopped to speak to her. “I know you were behind this. How did you do it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, so it’s just a coincidence that Angelica Lin now has a lead in the public polls.”
“It’s not my fault Dr. H. turned out to be a raging kinkasaurus!”
“He could’ve weathered the original vid. I bet you sent those death threats, so the peacekeepers would scan everyone in the lobby. How did you know Mrs.—it—wasn’t human?”
“I didn’t know! No one had any idea until today!”
“I can’t believe I missed it. I thought I could always tell.”
“Well, you could only ever see her eyes.”
“I must be losing my edge.”
Elfrida glanced over the fake-marble balustrade that bounded the four-storey drop to the farm. You could feel the communal depression from here, as if blasted hopes were a tangible, clammy draught.
“I gotta go, Cyds.” Over her shoulder she added, “Be happy with what you’ve done.”
“I had nothing to do with it!” Cydney bounced after Elfrida and clutched her arm. “The peacekeepers work for UNVRP! They answer to Dr. Seth! He’d have had to approve their orders! He obviously sent them to screw up the press conference, figuring to kick his rival when he was down!”
“If so, it hasn’t done him much good. He’s still trailing in the polls.”
“You can’t blame me! I didn’t do anything wrong! I love you!” Cydney’s big, beautiful green eyes welled up.
“Oh, Cyds,” Elfrida choked. She let Cydney wrap her arms around her. “I just can’t believe everything’s gone so wrong.”
“It’s not the end of the world. I mean, I know it sucks. But as long as we’re together, we’ll figure it out.” Cydney’s arms tightened. “We are together, aren’t we? Still?”
Elfrida nodded jerkily. The smell of Cydney’s Chanel No. 666 perfume, the tickle of her hair, and the warmth of her hug comforted her, familiar in a world that had turned upside-down.
“C’mon, let’s go back to our sandcastle,” Cydney said. “It doesn’t matter about this, I was just grabbing interviews.”
Elfrida wanted to say yes. But she could not afford to hide under the covers, literally or metaphorically. Too much was at stake. “I have to go, Cyds. I’ll catch up with you later.”
★
She found Vlajkovic in the Hobbit Hole. Tablets propped on the tables screened Sexbotgate commentary.
“Hey,” Vlajkovic said. He was staring blearily at bot-porn with Dr. Hasselblatter’s head Photoshopped in. “Welcome to the post-mortem.”
“I guess we did the best we could,” Elfrida said. “It’s out of our control now.”
“No, it’s not.” Vlajkovic pulled her down beside him. He poured her a drink. Even before she tasted it, she knew from the way Vlajkovic smelled that he wasn’t drinking coffee. “We tried your way. Gave Dr. Hasselblatter the benefit of the doubt. Believed he’d keep his promises. Believed in him. That didn’t work out. So … now we’re gonna try my way.”
Elfrida froze. They planned to go through with their rebellion! This was her worst fear come true. It would spell the end of the Venus Project, whether they succeeded or failed.
But this time, she had the presence of mind not to react with shocked condemnation. She objected, “The peacekeepers? We saw them in action today. They’re a lot more professional than we thought.”
“Please. They’re good at frisking people. Me, I was happy with what we saw. Even after they realized that Mrs. H. wasn’t human, they still didn’t shoot her! She could’ve been weaponized. Dangerous. And they just sprayed a bunch of signal-blocking foam at her. To me, that says they won’t shoot us, either. It’s gonna be a walkover,” Vlajkovic declared, too loudly.
“Can’t we at least wait until after the election? It’s only another two days!”
“What’s the point of waiting?”
“But … but what about UNVRP’s surface assets? Even if you succeed in taking over the hab, they’ll take away all the mining equipment, the phavatars, everything. You’ll be broke.” You won’t be able to get the He3 out of the ground, she thought. She hadn’t confronted him about that yet.
Vlajkovic’s wolfish grin appeared. “Remember, Dr. Seth mentioned some firmware updates? Those are being installed as we speak. Seth’s a good guy, but he doesn’t understand modern robotics. We didn’t have to bring the phavatars in for servicing. Just squirt the updates down the telepresence link. They’ll all be upgraded by this time tomorrow.”
“When you say upgraded … do you mean jailbroken?”
“Yes,” he hissed in her ear, smelling like a distillery.
“Oh. Well, then … I guess nothing stands in our way.”
They drank to that. The local potato liquor went straight to Elfrida’s head. Feeling dizzy, she experienced a new sense of resolve.
Nothing stood in the rebels’ way…
… except her.
23 Years Earlier. Callisto
The rest of the company finally turned up. That made 225 Marines on Callisto. Angelica’s platoon had been rattling around in their barracks, using the extra space as a gym. Now, they were hot-bunking. On day three there was a fistfight, and the Space Corps girl got called in to sort things out.
Angelica wasn’t clear on exactly what the Space Corps did. They were do-gooders, she thought. Didn’t they have a role in that crazy plan to terraform Venus?
Mostly, Space Corps agents operated via telepresence. This one, however, was real. Callisto’s distance from anywhere else made remote operations infeasible.
“Hi,” the Space Corps girl said, fiddling with a stylus. She was petite and sultry, no older than they were. “I’m Gloria dos Santos. I’ll be your conflict resolution facilitator today. Um, nice to meet you. Charles?”
“C-Mutt,” the secret student of legal history drawled.
“And, um, Drayawray?”
“That’s DrayAWOOray, you pronounce it.”
“Got it.” Dos Santos made a note on her tablet. “I understand that there was a disagreement over, um, a tin can?”
C-Mutt exploded. The tin can was his. He didn’t mind people looking at it, but this fucker had no right to fucking touch it. It was fucking valuable. C-Mutt was going to sell it to a museum, and he didn’t want some fucker’s fucking fingerprints on it.
“You ain’t selling that shit to no museum,” Drayawray jeered. “You can pick those up offa the fucking ground where I come from.”
“In pristine fucking condition? With the original contents?”
Gloria dos Santos said desperately. “Guys? Guys, where did you find this tin can, anyway?”
“I found it,” C-Mutt growled.
“Sorry. Charles?”
C-Mutt explained that the Marines operated the escort vehicle for the UNSA phavatars exploring Callisto’s other great crater, Asgard. The vehicle was a RORSS (Remotely Operated Roving Support System). It carried a hydrogen-fueled generator to recharge the phavatars, and it shuttled the samples they collected back to Valhalla Base.
“As you know, ma’am,” C-Mutt said, “the first base on Callisto was in the Asgard area, more than a century ago. But they all died, and the UNSA guys are looking for clues as to what went wrong. So that’s where I found this. Wanna see?”
C-Mutt unwrapped the famous tin can. Angelica had seen it already. Standing against the wall of dos Santos’s office, waiting to be questioned as a witness to the fistfight, she
watched dos Santos. She felt sorry for the girl. Her severe ponytail and UN-blue uniform had no chance of hiding her eye-catching looks, and she had no chance of getting the Marines to take her seriously. Angelica knew how that felt.
At the same time, Angelica felt a twinge of irritation. Dos Santos might not know it, but she was getting suckered into C-Mutt’s game, letting him call the plays.
The can had a flag on its label, discolored from having lain for 150 years in Callisto’s radioactive snow.
“Wow,” dos Santos said. “Isn’t that the flag of the United States of America?” She reached out to touch it.
C-Mutt whisked his treasure away. “That’s right. The first explorers were Americans. They were United Statesians. And this is what they ate.” He read off the can. “Spam.”
“Betcha that’s why they all died,” Drayawray sneered. “You ever see any meat that color?” He made the wee-wonh wee-wonh noise of a radiation alert.
“The can’s radproof, ya meatbrain.”
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” dos Santos said. “Once upon a time, the United States was the mightiest empire in the solar system. They colonized Mercury, they colonized Mars, they were the first to explore the Jovian moons. Now—gone.” She spread her hands as if releasing something. Angelica thought of birds. “Maybe the UN will go the same way, eventually. Maybe the PLAN will finish us off. Or maybe CyberDestiny is right, and our own bots will outcompete us.”
They all laughed. The activist collective CyberDestiny had made a splash by calling on the UN to recognize the equality of mechanical intelligences. Everyone sensible considered this to be deranged.
“Anyway, when you look at the long run,” dos Santos concluded, “it really puts things in perspective. What’s the point of knocking each other around, when we’re all out here together, 650 million kilometers from home? Just hug and say sorry, guys.”
Angelica hid a smile of admiration. Dos Santos had known what she was doing all along.
As they drifted out of the Space Corps office, dos Santos said to Angelica, “I guess we didn’t need you, after all. Sorry to waste your time.”
“That’s OK,” Angelica said. “What else have I got to do?”
She drifted through the hole in the stiffened fabric wall that led to the admin module. This was REMF country. Open-plan, it resembled a factory floor, with standing desks protruding from the sides of clunky machines called ‘centers.’ This module housed the base’s key life-support functions, and the UNSA techies who managed the machines, and the admins who managed the techies.
Angelica snagged a grab handle on the side of the comms center. She was waiting for C-Mutt to catch up so they could head back to the barracks together.
She heard dos Santos whisper behind her. “Charles, I wonder if I could ask. Is there any new information regarding that spaceship?”
‘That spaceship’ was a resupply barge that had arrived in Callisto orbit two months behind schedule. Its profile checked out, but there was some issue with its security certificates. The civilians weren’t supposed to know about it. Of course they all did. Angelica could see the ship on the comms center screen from where she stood. It looked like a fly crawling across the face of Jupiter.
“Nothing yet,” C-Mutt answered, also whispering. “We’re in contact with the haulage coordinators at UNSA, but you know how long it takes to get any information out of them.”
As if he was handling it himself, Angelica thought irritably. In fact, C-Mutt knew no more than anyone else. He just gave the impression that he did.
She understood that she had a touch of hab-sickness. This was a technical term for “wanting to punch people because you can’t get away from their stupid faces.” Hab-sickness had been the underlying cause of the fight between C-Mutt and Drayawray. It came suddenly to Angelica that the biggest threat they faced out here was each other.
“Oh my God,” one of the comms techs yelped.
Then the hab leapt under their feet, and Angelica was back in California, reliving the earthquake that had killed everyone she loved.
xvi.
At midnight, Elfrida disconnected her contacts from the network. She left her phone on her pillow. Then she put on an extra layer of thermals, and slipped out of the sandcastle.
The village was quiet. Too quiet.
It was night. Of course, it had been night ever since she got here. Most people in the test hab kept to the officially ordained 24-hour cycle. But the unemployed and the illegals tended to hang out in the square all the time, cat-napping when they felt like it, playing games on cheapo home immersion kits.
Not tonight.
Sneaking through the streets, Elfrida was so frightened she felt feverish. But she couldn’t turn back. Vlajkovic and his friends were going to stage their assault tonight.
She had a narrow window of time to stop them. And she could think of only one way to do it.
She ran across the desert, zigzagging between patches of groundfish.
Down in the parking lot, she looked for the rover that she and Vlajkovic had taken out two weeks back. She recognized it by the Brainrape and Thud ‘N’ Blunder bumper stickers. She got in and whizzed through the pre-EVA checklist.
When she turned the engine on, Vlajkovic’s music thundered through the parking-lot. She couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. But no one came running to investigate. They were probably all holed up in the Hobbit Hole, counting bullets.
To deafening howls of “Aliens! Will eat! Your braaaains!!!” she drove into the airlock.
The rover’s log provided her with a record of her previous journey with Vlajkovic. It was annoying that the rover had no autodrive, but she was able to follow the coordinates across the floor of the crater, and down the ramp to the UNVRP water mine.
As soon as she was underground, the satellite navigation crapped out. Well, she could remember the route they’d taken. Pretty much.
She drove slowly between the pillars of ice. A mining bot scurried across the rover’s nose. She followed it to the working face. This was where they’d parked last time. She wriggled into an EVA suit, took a deep breath of canned air, and exited the vehicle.
She immediately felt chilly, as if the intense -170° cold were penetrating her suit.
Imagination. Don’t let it run away with you, Goto.
Using her helmet lamp, she watched the bots chopping chunks of ice and stacking them on the automated trolleys.
When one of the trolleys set off, she followed it.
The trolley whisked around the pillars like a centipede. Elfrida had to jog to keep up. She forgot how little headroom there was, and how little she weighed here. Her helmet whacked into the roof. She tumbled to the ground and slid helplessly across the ice until she crashed into a pillar.
Vlajkovic’s voice echoed in her mind: one failure could kill everyone down here …
She sat up. The mine had not collapsed. Her forehead throbbed where it had banged against the inside of her helmet. This suit was so old it didn’t even have crash protection.
“SUIT COMMAND,” she said breathlessly. “Integrity check!”
The suit’s computer—it was too dumb to qualify as an MI—took forever to run its checks. Elfrida concluded in advance that it wasn’t damaged, based on the fact that she wasn’t dead.
But the trolley she was following had vanished.
Her helmet lamp flashed across ice pillars, all of which looked exactly the same.
She had no idea where she was, or which way to go.
And there was no network coverage down here.
“Pressurization 100%,” her suit said. “Telemetry sensors undamaged. Air supply undamaged. Spare oxygen tank missing.”
“MISSING?!”
Elfrida felt at her back. Yup. Missing. It must have come off when she fell. She whirled around, looking for it.
“Primary tank contains sufficient oxygen for thirty-seven minutes at average levels of exertion. Please top up within thirty minutes. This complet
es my integrity check.”
23 Years Earlier. Callisto
The hab stopped shaking. The REMFs milled in panic. Angelica kicked through them. She had to get out of here. Get back to barracks. Get her Zero.5.
C-Mutt crouched in front of the valve that led to the flexitube. He was hitting anyone who tried to reach it. “It’s gone!” he yelled. “Gone, gone, fucking gone!”
“What’s gone?” Angelica yelled.
“The fucking barracks! Go through this door and you die!”
The main viewport screen in the admin module had whited out. Angelica pushed off from the wall and jumped back to the middle of the room. She landed on top of the people clustered around the life support center.
They were watching the feed from one of the remote cameras on the rim of Valhalla Crater.
The base looked all wrong.
The drilling rig had fallen over.
And where the barracks module should’ve been, there sat an UNSA lifeboat. Its drive shield glowed red-hot, cooling.
It had landed on the barracks.
“The fucking meatbrains,” Angelica said. “They miscalculated their fucking landing, the fuckers ...”
There had been a hundred and fifty Marines in there.
The lifeboat sat in a ring of pulverized wreckage.
The tube connecting the barracks to the admin module had also been fragged. Its end stuck out of the side of the admin module like a root sprouting from an old potato. If the tube had been a bit shorter, or the modules a bit closer together, they’d be dead now, too.
The experimental hydroponics module was totaled. A piece of the barracks must’ve punctured it. Explosive decompression.
“Zoom in,” someone begged.
“This is it.”
“That doesn’t look like a robo-drop! It looks like a ship!”
God, these REMFs were slow. “Yes, it’s a ship,” Angelica said. “It’s the Farhauler’s lifeboat.”
They all turned to her. “Whose lifeboat?”
“The Farhauler’s?”
“You mean, that supply ship that arrived late?”
“So it’s not the PLAN?”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 74
