“Wasn’t you, Ms. Goto. Don’t be so quick to take responsibility for other people’s stupidity.”
The righthand half of the screen showed a surveillance-cam view of the life support operations center. Blue helmets crowded the room. Medibots attended the wounded. Other peacekeepers tinkered with the consoles, their postures relaxed. They were all wearing rebreather rigs and/or EVA suits.
Doug tapped a corner of the screen. A corpse in a business suit lay on the floor. It was Dr. Ulysses Seth.
“Is he dead, too?”
“Can’t see him breathing.”
She turned on Doug. “How can you just sit there? You gave them the guns!”
On the screen, the blue helmets exchanged high fives.
“They’re winning!”
Somehow, it had never occurred to Elfrida that Vlajkovic’s rebels might lose.
“Foregone conclusion,” Doug said. “Whoever controls Life Support, controls the hab.”
“What have they done?”
“Atmospheric recalibration for outcome optimization. Those in the know call it gunking the air.”
“Gunk? Like, fast-acting SSRI aerosols, like the cops use on Earth?”
“Knockout gas. We installed that capability in the Hotel Mercury era, in case the tourists started acting dumb. Never had to use it.” Doug’s jaw bunched. “I hope the peacekeepers know to use a low concentration. That stuff is powerful. Then again, it may be inert after all this time.”
Unable to sit still, Elfrida jumped to her feet. “You have to do something.”
He shook his head. “We set them up to fail.”
“Yeah, obviously … Wait, what?”
“We knew they’d fail. You put a bunch of office workers and lab techs up against trained peacekeepers, they will lose. No one except his own desperate people would have bet on Mike Vlajkovic.”
“So what, what was the point? Do you just like watching people die?”
She could not square Doug’s morose demeanor with the visionary optimism she’d seen last time she was here.
“No one likes death and destruction, Ms. Goto. But it was decided that this was the best way to sever our ties with UNVRP.”
The headlines on the lefthand side of the screen continued to update.
President Declares Mercury Conflict ‘Unacceptable’ … Calls for UNVRP to be ‘Held to Account’ … Live! Interviews with Victims Reveal Anger at UNVRP …
“That’s Cydney,” Elfrida yelped.
She swiped at the headline.
Cydney’s face filled the screen. Her hair was all over the place, and she had a graze on one cheek, but she was gabbling fluently. “I’m in the lowest level of UNVRP HQ, known as the vault, where countless artifacts salvaged from the fall of the United States are stored. Among these dusty treasures, hundreds of civilians have taken refuge following the outbreak of violence—”
Elfrida sagged in relief. “Thank God she’s safe,” she mumbled. “Is the vault separately pressurized? They’re not getting gunked?”
Doug brushed his fingers across Cydney’s face. She faded out.
“This was none of my doing. I advocated against it, but I was overruled.”
“How could you be overruled? You’re the president!”
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re not what?”
“Not the president. Just the director of mining operations.”
“Huh?”
Doug twitched. “Excuse me,” he said, rising. “I’ll be right back.” He went into the cabin.
Baffled, Elfrida fidgeted. The day had grown brighter. It was going to be a beautiful morning in Mt. Gotham. She could hear that odd background noise she’d noticed on her first visit. A murmuring sound, like a river, or a train full of people.
Doug came back out of the cabin. He sat down next to her on the glider. “Sorry about that,” he smiled. “Where were we?”
“You were explaining that you set Vlajkovic’s rebellion up to fail, so that UNVRP would be discredited, and probably the Venus Project will be cancelled, and God knows how many people are already dead!”
“And you wanted to know why we all can’t just get along. Well, Ms. Goto, I have to tell you that first of all, human nature, and secondly, this company ain’t sharing shit with the motherfucking UN.”
Elfrida flinched as if he’d struck her.
“It was the UN that destroyed the United States of America. My daddy tried to play nice with you folks, signing that deal with UNVRP, but you know what, Ms. Goto? Screw that shit.”
He finger-snapped the screen back on. Blue berets were herding EVA-suited rebels into Life Support Operations, forcing them to remove their helmets, slapping them around.
“You folks can be pretty brutal when the mood takes you,” Doug said.
“I can tell you right now you’re not going to get away with this. I’ve already transmitted your confession to Earth!” she bluffed.
“With what? You’re as clean as a baby. No implants whatsoever. Scanned you last time you were here.”
“That’s illegal,” Elfrida said weakly.
“According to whose laws? You’re not in UN territory anymore, Ms. Goto.”
“If that’s a threat,” Elfrida started. She was shaking.
“Quit picking on the poor girl,” said a voice from the doorway of the cabin.
It sounded like Doug. It was Doug. He leaned against the doorframe, holding a glass of orange juice.
Elfrida looked back at the man on the glider. He was still Doug. He was in two places at once.
“Uuuhoooh,” she croaked.
Both Dougs laughed. They both had the same charming hee-haw! laugh.
The Doug in the doorway stopped laughing first. “You shouldn’t be let out without a muzzle on you, Doug,” he said.
“Well, you were out of line bringing her here, Doug,” said the other. “You should’ve given her a fresh tank of air and sent her on her way.”
“That’d be murder. Then again, I guess you don’t much care about that.”
“You can’t do a hard job without making some hard decisions,” said the Doug on the glider. “That’s why I’m the chief of security, and you dig holes for a living’.”
The other Doug met Elfrida’s gaze. He said gloomily, “Ms. Goto, this is Grumpy Doug, and he is an assassin.”
“Why you gotta put it like that, Doug? All melodramatic and shit.” The other Doug leaned back, pushing the glider to and fro with one booted toe. “Get me some orange juice, while you’re standing up. And I bet Ms. Goto would like something, too. Don’t turn down our hospitality, hon. You’re going to be our guest for a while.”
Elfrida’s head swivelled from one man to the other. They helpfully moved to stand side by side. Grumpy Doug stuck his index fingers in his cheeks to give himself dimples.
They both wore identical sweatshirts, jeans, and gecko-grip work boots. Their black hair was styled in the same fringey alpha-male cut. They even had identical scars on their chins. They looked like … no, they were the same man.
“You …” Elfrida’s mouth cottoned up. She tried again. “You’re clones.”
xix.
“I appreciate your composure in the face of the unexpected,” Grumpy Doug, the assassin, said. “You didn’t run screaming. Some would. There’s a lotta prejudice out there.”
The only reason Elfrida hadn’t run screaming was because she knew she wouldn’t get far.
Cloning was illegal in the UN. And now she knew why.
Confronting the same man twice over, she felt like she was losing her grip on reality.
“Where did you, were you, uh? On Ganymede?”
She’d heard that there was an underground cloning industry on the de-facto independent Jovian moon.
“Heh,” Grumpy Doug said. “Our technology beats Ganymede’s all to shit. We’ve been doin’ it longer.”
She looked from one to the other again. Her eye kept seeking differences to hang onto. There were none. This was upsetting on
an existential level.
“Which of you did I meet the first time I was here?”
“Neither of them,” came another voice, from the edge of the clearing.
A third Doug strode towards the cabin.
Followed by a fourth, fifth, and sixth.
Elfrida uttered a moan.
“Great to see you, Ms. Goto!” said Doug #3. “I’ve been hoping we would have the opportunity for another chat.”
Grumpy Doug, enjoying her shock, said, “Meet Sneezy, Doc, and Sleepy. You’ve already met the president.”
“Call me Happy,” said Doug #3—President Doug. She could tell him apart because he was wearing a suit and tie. He looked like a retro idol with a group of computer-generated backup singers.
“How many of you are there?”
“Seven. Dopey stayed home to handle the media.”
“Got popcorn,” said Doug #5. “Where’s the show?”
They all crowded onto the porch to watch the screen. President Doug was not interested in watching the surveillance-cam feeds from UNVRP HQ. He surfed the news until he found himself doing a piece to camera in the White House.
“This barbaric conflict is absolutely unacceptable,” droned the Doug on the screen. “Wrightstuff, Inc. is extremely concerned as regards the impact on industrial production and exports from Mercury. We have already contributed personnel and resources to the peacekeeping force that is bravely struggling to suppress the violence in UNVRP HQ.”
“Unconvincing,” said one of the Dougs.
“Too many adverbs and intensifiers,” said the one she thought was Grumpy Doug.
“Everyone’s a critic,” President Doug said, grinning at Elfrida. “Dopey’s secret superpower is the Press Statement of Excruciating Dullness. He also wields a mean Overused Cliché. Works great to keep the press off our backs.”
“I also wish to express my concern for the safety of Zazoë Heap,” Dopey Doug said, his brow wrinkling. “Everyone here is a huge fan.”
“Zazoë?” yelled several Dougs. “What’s happened to her?”
“This is live. He’s reacting to something. Let’s see what.”
News items blizzarded past until the search engine found a relevant feed. Zazoë Heap’s lovely form lay crumpled inside a translucent orange ball, in a VIP suite in Hotel Mercury.
“Just stay calm, Zaz,” said Cydney’s voice. “Remain where you are, and help will come soon. Do you have any words for your fans?”
“It hurts,” moaned Zazoë Heap.
“I know. I know. But you have to be strong, Zaz. Think about how much it would suck to die in a dump like this. Anyway, you won’t die. You got into your Personal Survival Capsule as soon as possible. That was a survivor move.”
“The air. Was all burney. I breathed it.”
“Crap,” said President Doug. He swiped Zazoë Heap away and turned to (probably) Grumpy Doug. “The knockout gas. All burney, that doesn’t sound right. Find out how much those meatheads used.”
“On it.” Grumpy Doug went into the cabin.
Squashed between two Dougs on the glider, Elfrida gave way to tears. Hearing Cydney’s voice had undermined her façade of defiance. Now the magnitude of this catastrophe overwhelmed her.
After a while, boots clattered down the steps. Peeling her fingers away from her eyes, she saw they’d all gone except for President Doug. She smelled coffee.
Seated in the wicker chair, President Doug poured an aromatic black stream into a mug that said The Joke’s Over, Now Bring Out The Real President. He pushed it along the porch rail to her. “It helps to cry,” he said. “Sometimes, you gotta just curl up and howl like a dog.”
“What happened with the knockout gas?”
“Unclear. They probably used too much. Our story will be that it was stored wrong. And maybe also contaminated by microbes from that crazy gengineering operation they run over there.”
Elfrida laughed. “Crazy,” she said. “Gengineering. Pot, meet kettle. Laugh.” Then she drank some coffee. It was just as good as the java at the Hobbit Hole, and in fact was probably the same stuff.
President Doug nodded. “You are absolutely correct, Ms. Goto. Call it cloning, gengineering, hybridization, or selective breeding, it’s all the same thing. We’ve been splicing and dicing our natural inheritance since we were proto-agriculturalists on the Anatolian plains.” He gestured at the trees around the cabin. “Here’s an example. When you manufacture soil from regolith, you introduce moisture, and that releases high levels of perchlorates. Also known as salts. So all these useless-lookin’ trees are actually gengineered creosote bushes, sucking the salts up. Creosote is all we grew here for the first twenty years. Had goats to browse it. Then you level up to cows, but you still gotta keep inputting nitrogen into the system. That’s where the vegetation plays a double role: it produces volatile organic nitrogen compounds when it decays.”
Obviously, President Doug would rather talk about paraterraforming than the tragedy taking place a few kilometers away.
“Yeah, you’ve got a real paradise here,” Elfrida said. “Can I go home now?”
“Home?”
An image of her parents’ apartment in Rome popped into her mind. “Back to UNVRP HQ. People are dying. I have to do something.”
“I think the peacekeepers have the situation under control.”
“What can you tell me about the vault? Cydney said hundreds of people were down there. Are they going to be safe?”
“It’s a vault. My great-grandfather schlepped a lot of artifacts out here from Earth. Lincoln’s bed, George Washington’s writing desk, a Mac Air, a Chevy, artworks from MOMA and the Smithsonian, that kind of thing. And also a huge IP archive. That’s the only thing we make use of. The physical stuff just sits down there. But the vault is climate-controlled, with an independent air circulation system. So I guess the folks down there are as safe as anyone.”
President Doug downed the last of his coffee and stood up.
“Avail yourself of the facilities, Ms. Goto. There’s food in the fridge, a guest bedroom. Try not to watch too much screen, it’ll only make you feel worse. Get some sleep if you can.”
He jumped lightly down the porch steps.
“You can’t make me stay here!” Elfrida bellowed after him.
He twirled one hand as he disappeared down the path. The undergrowth shook. There were security goons in the trees, even if she couldn’t see them.
She sank back onto the glider. She was a prisoner.
★
Trending stories that morning:
Riots on Mercury ‘Under Control,’ Says UNVRP
Zazoë Heap Critically Injured in Mercury Shootout
Ringleaders Claim They Acted in Response to Genetic Discrimination
Zazoë Heap Fighting For Life
24 Hours Before Election, Violence Overshadows Campaign
Zazoë Heap Dies of Her Wounds, Was Shot During Mercury Riots
Death Toll From Mercury Riots Reaches 117
Zazoë Fans Stage Grief-Fests on Earth, Luna, Ganymede, Titan, Ceres, Eros
Candidates for UNVRP Directorship Share Their Memories of Zazoë
Candidate Mork Rapp Calls for Election to be Postponed in Honor of Zazoë
★
“He’s just saying that because he’s polling at five percent,” said Derek Lorna. “Stay cool, Angie. They’re not going to postpone the election.”
“You try staying cool when you’ve spent the night hiding inside the Apollo space capsule, wondering if every breath would be your last. I am not overreacting. It was a fucking nightmare. Six hundred people squeezed into an underground storage unit, with no food, no water, no toilets …”
“No kidding? They’ve got the Apollo space capsule hidden away down there? Which one?”
“All I can tell you is it had a working pressure seal, which is why I put up with it for twelve hours. If they had found a way to pipe the knockout gas into the vault, I’d still have been OK for a while.”<
br />
“That’s my girl. Always plan for the worst but hope for the best.”
There was a significant time delay on the conversation. Several minutes after Derek Lorna delivered this bromide, he winced at an explosion in his ear.
“Always plan for the worst, says the guy who didn’t see this coming! Doggone it, Derek! Why didn’t you warn me it was going to kick off early?”
“Whoa. This is not on me! Dr. Seth knew how important it was to wait until after the election. He flagrantly disobeyed orders. Or else his people did. He believed they were like children, looking to him for guidance. I did suspect he was a wee bit out of touch with reality.”
“He’s dead, you know.”
“Yeah. Poor old guy.”
“Heart attack. The old-fashioned way to go.”
“He was a great scientist in his day. Have you seen the obits?”
“No; it’s all Zazoë, all the time. Makes a change from Sexbotgate.”
(Pause.)
“I wasn’t going to mention this, but Angie? Leaking that vid to the internet? Was an asshole move.”
“Excuse me? All I did was fix what you broke. If you—”
“If you’d given me time, I would have fixed it myself. Now that vid is out there, which I do not appreciate.”
“Good thing you wore a mask.”
“So? It’s obviously my bedroom. You can see the Leonardo da Vinci at 3:38. People are commenting on it. I’ve had to get rid of the picture, and I’ll probably end up redoing the wall treatments.”
“Stay cool, Derek. Everyone already knows you’re a freak.”
“You drive me crazy, you know that?”
“‘In a good way.’ There, I fixed it for you.”
“We need to stay focused.”
“That’s what Cydney keeps telling me. Cydney Blaisze, my new sex toy, if you can grok it.”
“Wait a minute, Cydney Blaisze? Wasn’t she with that Goto chick?”
“Yes. It’s complicated. But speaking of Goto, can you find out what’s happened to her? Her name isn’t on the casualty lists.”
“Is she a threat?”
“She might be. Anyway, I’d feel better if I knew where she was.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Your job right now is to emote about Zazoë’s tragic genius, and suck up to the NEO voters.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 76
