“Sigh. I do appreciate the need to stay positive, but have you seen the latest polls? I’m back in single digits. That bitch Patel has a solid lead, with eighteen hours to go. I dunno, Derek … I’m getting the sense that it’s all over bar the shouting.”
“This, I am not hearing.”
“And when you think about the fact that all this is just damage control, picking up the pieces from Charlie’s death …”
“Let’s not go there. What happened, happened. What will happen, will happen.”
“Easy to say when you’re a hundred million klicks away.”
“All I’m saying is we don’t have time for counterfactuals. I know, I know it sucks that Charlie’s dead. But right now, you have to get out there and connect with the voters.”
“It’s the NEO colonists that are going to swing this thing. And I can’t connect with them, Derek. Tried, failed. I think they’re a bunch of space pests, and as much as I smile and upvote their baby pictures, they can tell I despise them.”
“Angie, Angie. You of all people should know it doesn’t have to be real. It just has to look good.”
“What would really help is if someone whacked the Patel bitch.”
“I didn’t hear that. A hundred and seventeen dead is enough. Anyway, I don’t have any assets on 13882 Calcott.”
“Great.”
“Sigh. The truth is, things have been kind of crazy here. So I may not have been paying attention to the extent that would be ideal. But I’ve got this end under control now. And I promise you, when the day after election day dawns, you will be the new director of UNVRP.”
“Strange; when you say those words I feel a sense of dread.”
“You’re still torn up about Charlie, aren’t you?”
“I loved him, Derek. Believe me or not, I don’t care. I’ve loved him ever since I was nineteen.”
“I believe you. He was a great guy.”
(Sound of sobbing.)
“Angie? Angie! C’mon. Big girls don’t cry. You’ve got a new sex toy, so play with her. Take your mind off it. And then go do a couple of birthday parties and a ship christening or two.”
“While you, what? Disport yourself with the maidbot?”
“Actually, I’m into gardening bots these days. But no, I have stuff to do. It’s kind of urgent, so … Ping me later, OK? And don’t forget to use quantum encryption protocols and DNR protection.”
xx.
Elfrida slept for hours.
When she woke up, afternoon light was pouring through the windows. She couldn’t believe she’d slept the whole morning away. She stumbled to the cabin’s rustic bathroom and splashed her face with water from the faucet.
A faucet! Such an ordinary thing. Such a luxury, in a hollowed-out mountain at Mercury’s north pole.
The mirror showed her a comically hideous vision. In addition to her swollen nose, she now had a purple lump on her forehead where she’d collided with the roof of the water mine. Her eyes were massively bloodshot.
She could hear talking heads and dramatic music. She went into the kitchen. Grumpy Doug was watching the news on a tablet, and eating Krispy Komets cereal from the box.
Elfrida would have liked to spurn the Dougs’ food, but she was ravenous. She found waffles, cream, and fresh blueberries in the fridge. As she microwaved, poured, and sprinkled, she looked over Grumpy Doug’s shoulder.
It was all over. The ‘rioters’ were in custody. The solar system resounded with calls for them to pay for the murder of Zazoë Heap.
Cydney appeared as a stand-in for Angelica Lin, who was busy kissing babies (via telepresence) on Near Earth Objects.
“We strongly believe that this tragedy in no way reflects the values of Inferior Space,” Cydney said. “And I know my dear friend Zazoë Heap would agree. Vote for Angelica Lin, and get justice.”
“Good to see you’re not too traumatized, Cyds,” Elfrida mumbled.
She finished her waffles and wandered into the living-room. The wooden furniture and throw cushions reminded her of a cheap vacation chalet in the Sudtirol.
“Can I go outside?” she yelled. “Or will you shoot me?”
“No. Yes,” Grumpy Doug yelled back.
“I knew it.”
She leaned her forehead against the window. Her unicorn cavorted across the clearing. Blinking back tears, she’d inadvertently blinked up her contacts’ knowledge guide.
“Help,” she idly gaze-typed.
The unicorn froze, one hoof in the air. “Do you need help?”
“Yes. Can you get me a network connection, an EVA suit, a toothbrush, and a new life, not necessarily in that order?”
“Are you lost?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want your mommy?”
“Yes,” Elfrida typed.
The unicorn threw up its head. It reared, sparkles cascading from its rainbow-streaked mane. “Paging … Ingrid Haller!” it bellowed. “Your child is waiting for you at … Eagle’s Nest, Little America, Mercury! Any security personnel in this area, please proceed immediately to …Eagle’s Nest, Little America, Mercury … and ensure that … Elfrida Goto … is safe and happy, while we contact her mother … Ingrid Haller!”
“Haller … ler … ler …”
Astonished, Elfrida heard her mother’s name echoing back from afar, as if the unicorn’s announcement had reverberated through the mountain. How had it done that?
Grumpy Doug crashed into the room. “What the fuck?” he said, spraying Krispy Komet crumbs.
Elfrida heard a siren in the distance. “Ho ho, hee hee,” she said. “You never guessed I wear contacts. I took them out to go through decon. And I guess you didn’t search my clothes.”
“Contacts?”
“You know, network interface contacts? Like children use?”
Grumpy Doug glared at her and subvocalized orders into a comms implant.
“I guess you guys are signatories to the Interplanetary Convention on the Safety of the Child,” Elfrida continued. “Well, I’ve got kiddie contacts. They must have been pre-programmed with universal network access codes for emergencies. So it accessed your tannoy, and now everyone knows I’m here, including the cops on Earth, and—”
“Blocked that,” Grumpy Doug said. “Denied it access to our relay sat.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Hon, I am illegal.” The siren noise doubled, approaching from at least two directions. “Ingrid Haller. Your mother’s name?”
She nodded.
The sound of a helicopter joined the mix. “Stay here.” Doug clattered out of the cabin.
From the window, Elfrida watched security officers spill into the clearing. Doug ambled towards them, presidentially calm.
She dashed back into the bedroom, which faced the other side of the clearing. Without stopping to think, she threw the window open, jumped down to the grass, and darted into the trees.
The undergrowth was denser on this side of the clearing. A branch snagged her sweatshirt. She heard crashing noises behind her. Shouts. The squelch of radios.
She ran. Each bound carried her over bushes as tall as herself. She kicked off from the branches of the trees, as if she were maneuvering in zero-gee. Gleefully, she realized that she was outdistancing her pursuers. Being Earthborn gave her an edge. She’d earned her muscles by living in gravity three times stronger than Mercury. I’m getting away—
She ran straight off the edge of a cliff.
Her momentum carried her out into the void. A glimpse of the gulf below her rammed home a brutal perceptual shift. That silver thread down there wasn’t a cable. It was a river. Those dots—people.
She was falling into a chasm at least a kilometer deep.
She plummetted—
—into a safety net.
Her belly-flop into the near-invisible mesh winded her. She rolled over, wheezing. At the edge of the cliff she’d fallen from, security officers gestured at her with their guns.
She squirmed furt
her out into the net, sick with vertigo. The murmuring noise she had heard before engulfed her, now composed of shouts, electronic announcements, and the whooshing of ventilation fans. Below, people walked on the air.
She struggled to her feet and floundered across the net. An orange tag stuck up. She pulled on it, and a square of net came up like a hatch, opening.
“Stop! Ms. Goto, don’t do this!”
She dropped through the hatch. This time, her fall took longer, but she landed better. She hit the next net down feet first, bounced, and scrambled after the people she had seen. They were no longer walking, but soaring away like gymnasts.
What are they scared of? Me, they’re scared of me.
The sides of the chasm towered over her, cliffs festooned with splarted-on balconies and window-boxes of vegetables. American flags rippled in a thermal updraught.
Grumpy Doug jumped into the top net, followed by his security goons.
The people ahead of Elfrida leapt onto a ledge as wide as a street. It was a street. She bounced out of the net and confronted front doors and lace-curtained windows carved out of the rock. A thousand hobbit holes. Tricycles and bicycles leaned against pot plants. The street was not quite flat. Someone had dropped a child’s ball and it was rolling downhill.
She took off running in the same direction.
She ran past shops, crèches, and public gardens scooped out of the cliffs. The street magically emptied at her approach. Glancing back, she saw Grumpy Doug pounding after her, with several goons close behind.
She ran faster, desperate to find some way off this exposed street. She came to a sharp bend. The street U-turned around the end of the chasm. This hab was built on the same plan as Hotel Mercury: a spiral ramp wrapping around a central atrium … or in this case, a chasm one kilometer deep, at least two long, and so narrow that she could see the fury on the faces of the security goons hurtling along the other side.
If this is a ginormous copy of Hotel Mercury, there should be radial corridors.
The next public garden she reached, she jinked into it.
Her U-turn around the end of the chasm had marked a change in the scenery. For the worse. One of the sun-lamps in this garden was out. She ran past a group of decrepit oldsters parked on benches. She stopped and gasped, “Which way?”
A crutch pointed at a giant smart poster of President Doug on the back wall of the garden. Below the poster was a door.
She pushed into boomba music, lazy shouts, the cramped dimensions of an asteroid hab. The smells of garlic and toilets assailed her. People grinned at her, didn’t bother to get out of her way. The ones who were horizontal didn’t even bother to get up.
Grumpy Doug crashed into the corridor.
Elfrida sobbed.
People got up for him. They crowded around him like fans mobbing a celebrity.
President Doug was a celebrity here, Elfrida remembered. And now, Grumpy Doug was having to fake it. He pointed at Elfrida, but got sidetracked by a small girl who wanted to show him something on her tablet.
Elfrida cackled weakly and started running again.
The corridor ended in a spiral staircase carved out of the rock, filthy with rat droppings.
She ran down.
Into another hab segment.
Looked back, and glimpsed Grumpy Doug sprinting after her, no longer pretending to be presidential.
Another staircase.
Another hab segment.
The sheer scale of this place disoriented her. All she could think of was to keep going down, in hopes of escaping back to the water mines.
But the lower she went, the worse everything looked, including the inhabitants. No more cooking smells, no more music, no more public art. Just emaciated human beings sprawled on the floor, wearing interface glasses, the oldest and cheapest way to escape from reality. The lucky ones also had coats. It was so cold down here Elfrida could see her breath. Heat rises, and in Mt. Gotham it had a long way to go.
At last she stumbled into the open.
And coughed on the reek of sewage.
A crush of people shuffled along the bank of the river she’d seen from the top of the chasm. This was the true bottom of the hab. She looked up at the blazing slit in the roof, like a cartoon Milky Way. That was how far down she’d come.
Adults and children perched on the regocrete wall, dangling lines into the river.
River?
No. An open sewer.
No. A water reclamation system.
Oh, ugh.
As exhausted and mindblown as she was, she still felt disgusted when she saw dead rats bobbing on a tide of raw turds and urine. She really, really didn’t want to know what those people were fishing for.
The crowd jostled her against the retaining wall. Hip-high on her, thigh-high on the spaceborn. You could easily fall over.
Ugh, ugh.
Bridges traversed the sewer at intervals. Most were rope-slung, jury-rigged. One was a grandiose arch of stone with a statue (of Doug, natch) at its apex.
She drifted with the crowd. She no longer hoped to find a way out. If there was one, these people would surely have escaped years ago.
They glanced at her, clocking her Earthborn physique. She cringed. Each unwanted eye contact reminded her that these were human beings—not rats, or data points, or pixellated faces in the news story that was already writing itself in her mind: Hab Horror! 10,000 Enslaved By Clone Gang on Mercury.
Bodies jostled against her back, her arms. She reflexively tried to make herself smaller. These people took physical contact for granted. She’d visited plenty of asteroid habs where people had equally poor manners—but always via telepresence, never in the flesh. That made a huge difference. The physical contact, body odor, and stares activated every defensive reflex in her brain, and she fought the urge to throw her elbows. She felt relief when her personal space opened up..
“You’re under arrest.”
She whipped around, stumbling. “So crowded.”
“What do you expect?” Grumpy Doug said. “It’s rush hour.”
Laughter from the onlookers.
“You have the right to remain silent, or to continue making ignorant observations.”
Cuffs bit her wrists, pinching her skin.
The only thing worse than being arrested, she realized, was being arrested—and being jeered at by spaceborn commuters who thought she was the bad guy.
xxi.
Grumpy Doug towed Elfrida through the crowd. Upstream from the stone bridge, an inflatable raft floated on the sewer. It supported a large cage. Inside, a dozen people sat, lay, or paced.
“Feel like spending a few days in there?” Grumpy Doug said. “Does that look more comfortable than the cabin?”
The street bulged into a plaza lined with shops. Mirrors coated the overhang of cliff. A blue light reflected off the mirrors, revolving atop an octagonal koban with glass walls. Grumpy Doug thrust her inside.
It was just like a koban anyplace (well, any poor place) on Earth. Uniformed police officers worked at screens, drank coffee, consoled a lost child, gave directions to the confused. They all rose to salute Grumpy Doug. He greeted them by name, cracked a joke or two, and guided Elfrida down a spiral stair in the middle of the koban. They landed in a security center below street level, which was more what she would have expected from a clone-run tyranny. Thousands of surveillance screens.
A female officer strip-searched Elfrida and scanned her with every type of ray known to man. They took her contacts.
At least she wasn’t handcuffed again afterwards. She rubbed the weals on her wrists, reminding herself of Earth and its laws. Laws that would save her, if she could only figure out how to invoke them.
Grumpy Doug waited for her in an office as empty as his eyes. A single vid hung on the wall, showing an antique helicopter lifting off a rooftop. Bullets ripped in slow motion through American flags at the edge of the roof, over and over.
Elfrida sat on a broken ergoform, which didn
’t conform to her body, but retained the impression of someone else’s skinnier thighs.
“Well?” Grumpy Doug said.
“Hab Horror: 10,000 Enslaved by Clone Gang on Mercury.” Elfrida listened to how the words sounded, and then shook her head. “The media always gets it wrong, don’t they?”
“Which is why we try to stay off their radar.”
“I’m not a threat.”
“To us? No. But you are a threat to someone.”
Elfrida started to ask who, caught it back. There were so many candidates.
“Made any enemies on Luna lately?”
“Luna? I have some friends there.” She thought of Mendoza. “People I know from work. That’s all.”
“So you don’t know anyone at the UN Leadership in Robotics Institute?”
“LIRI? No, I never—wait, I once attended a conference that was chaired by a LIRI guy. But that was months ago.”
“So, you don’t know why we would have been asked to eliminate you as a favor to LIRI.”
“No, I—what? Eliminate me?”
“Yup.” For the first time, Grumpy Doug’s expression held something other than hostility. “Sorry.”
“You can’t mean this. You don’t mean it.” She sprang up and backed into the corner of the office.
Grumpy Doug followed her trapped gaze to the vid of the helicopter in the wall frame. “Know what that is?”
“N-no. You can’t …”
“The fall of Washington. Our founder, the first Doug—Founder Doug, we call him—escaped in that helicopter when the Soy Latte Party of New York overran Washington in 2170. He hooked up with his rich friends. Commandeered what was left of NASA’s fleet, and fled into exile. They ended up taking refuge in the American colony here. The rest is history, as folks say.”
“Wrightstuff, Inc. is a listed corporation. You’ve got shareholders, partners, you’re subject to UN law, you can’t do this. You can’t hurt me.”
Grumpy Doug pushed the black wing of his fringe back. “The UN’s got it all their own way these days. Technology gives them total power over everyone on Earth, directly or indirectly. Ever heard of the ISA? Yes, of course you have. With the exception of a few luddites like yourself, they can not only read all your communications, they can read your freaking thoughts, or what you choose to store in your BCI, which is the same thing for most people. Sure, there’s encryption … but how many people bother? And even then, how do you know the ISA hasn’t figured out how to crack the latest free-speech app from Thumbsucker Corp.? You don’t. What it comes down to is this: As they used to say in America, love it or leave it.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 77
