The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series

by Felix R. Savage

  Elfrida trembled.

  “So we left it.”

  Doug approached closer to her.

  “Once upon a time, people thought technology would be the new equalizer. Power to the people. An end to government control. Well, it turns out that governments can use technology too, and they have bigger budgets.” Grumpy Doug sighed. “The US government wasn’t great at technology, surprisingly enough. And look what happened to them. The Big Disconnect. Secessionist movements from coast to shining coast. All leading up to a hipster gunman raising a soy latte in the Oval Office, proclaiming an end to tyranny.”

  “Don’t hurt me.”

  “The new equalizer, Ms. Goto, is the same as the old equalizer. Distance. Once upon a time, people emigrated to the New World to escape repression. Now, they emigrate to the Belt, to the Jovian moons … or to Mercury. The ISA can’t read your comms if you aren’t using the internet. And, even if they do hack your intranet, which ain’t happening here … because, as you mentioned, we’re a listed company, with a ten-figure market capitalization, and IT capacity up the wazoo … the cost of taking action rises proportionately with distance from Earth. So they don’t. Move.”

  “Oh my Jesus, forgive me—no, that wasn’t it. Mendoza taught me. Why can’t I remember? Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins—yes—save us from the fires of hell, and—”

  “Move.”

  It came to Elfrida that what he meant was, actually, move.

  She moved.

  Grumpy Doug touched the wall. It concertinaed. The floor ended in a drop into darkness. The reek of sewage drifted up, stronger than ever.

  “Are you gonna jump, or would you rather be pushed?”

  ★

  Elfrida stumbled along a narrow walkway beside a sewer. Grumpy Doug followed her, as silent as Death with a better haircut. His flashlight illuminated the damp stone ledge, the gleam of rushing sewage below. She felt the pulse of industrial motors in her breastbone.

  A sensor-triggered blaze of light drowned Grumpy Doug’s flashlight. The current vanished under a filth-splattered regocrete platform. On the far side of the platform, grilles jerked up and down. The sewer poured through them, and the solid waste got caught in the grilles. Comb-like attachments scraped it off into an overhead chute, which slanted down to a giant hopper at the far end of the walkway. Elfrida saw figures servicing the hopper, assumed they were bots, and realized after a second that they were humans in hazmat coveralls.

  “Help,” she screamed. “Help.”

  The noise of machinery crushed her voice.

  Grumpy Doug grabbed her arm and pulled her along the platform. “Not another word.”

  The hopper loomed over them. Shit-caked hoods peered over the edge. The workers were sorting the refuse, separating recyclables for separate processing. And now Elfrida knew what was going to happen to her. One 67-kilo load of refuse coming up. Classification: BIOWASTE.

  She struggled in Grumpy Doug’s grip. His voice seemed to come from a great distance.

  “Put the damn coverall on.”

  Orange fabric puddled on the catwalk.

  Grumpy Doug was stepping into an identical garment.

  “Those’re gecko boots? EVA-rated? Keep ‘em on. The coverall seals to them.”

  Elfrida fumbled with the preternaturally slippery fabric. The recycling workers watched in silence. When she had the coverall on—it was made for someone much taller—Grumpy Doug led her back to the filter grilles. The nearest one wheezed open. Sewage rapidly built up behind it, oozed across the catwalk, and started to spill over the top of the grille.

  “Hurry up!”

  Without waiting for her to move, Grumpy Doug picked her up and tossed her through the gap above the grille. She landed on her hands and knees in fast-rushing liquid filth. It came up to her elbows, chilling her flesh through the coverall.

  Grumpy Doug landed with a splash beside her. The grille slammed back up to the ceiling. The secondary scraper grille recommenced shuttling up and down.

  They stood in a shallow delta of wastewater, barred with shadows that made an almost pretty pattern on the water, like silk.

  “Watch your footing,” Grumpy Doug said. “It’s slippery.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Elfrida asked through the mesh covering her face.

  “Nope. You got a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  “What?”

  Grumpy Doug walked faster. “Your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  Twists of toxic foam flowed past. The current rilled against the backs of Elfrida’s legs. Her shins ached from the cold, although her feet, in her own EVA boots, were fine.

  “What’s my mother got to do with anything?”

  “You didn’t mention that she works for the New Holy Roman Empire’s intelligence service.”

  ★

  Elfrida nearly said, No, she doesn’t.

  The accusation stunned her.

  But then she thought about it.

  Why was her mother always so paranoid about ISA surveillance? Why had she been able to search an ISA database and find Elfrida’s name there, as she’d mentioned during their last talk?

  Goto, you are a chump.

  There was no way a mere clerk in the Rome prosecutor’s office would have access to ISA databases. Not in a million years.

  Grumpy Doug had to be telling the truth.

  Her mother was an agent of the New Holy Roman Empire, the cobbled-together state known for its permissive laws on religion. And all her life, Elfrida had never guessed.

  Does Dad know? she wondered, but that was a question for later.

  “How in God’s name do you know that?” she said.

  “Because I’m an NHRE agent, too.”

  ★

  Elfrida lost her footing. She went down on her ass. The icy water melded her coverall to her body, seeping in through leaky seams.

  Grumpy Doug’s flashlight beam swung over the walls and ceiling. He helped her up.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I don’t do God. But the great thing about the NHRE is you don’t have to do God. They don’t require belief in anything or anyone. That’s very different from us, here. We require belief in Doug.”

  Elfrida’s teeth chattered. “Why should I b-b-believe you?”

  “Because I didn’t shoot you?”

  “There is th-th-that.”

  “You OK?”

  “I’m fine. Explain to me how that works, that you’re President Doug’s clone, but you’re also a—a ….”

  “Say it,” he prompted. “A spy.”

  “A spy.”

  “Oldest game in human history, Ms. Goto. All the fancy eavesdropping technology in the universe can’t replace HUMINT.”

  “But why?”

  “President Doug is nuts.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Others have noticed, too.” Grumpy Doug strode on, splashing through the water. “We’re a member of the Sovereignty Forum, a debating society for sovereign and would-be sovereign entities. It’s a diverse membership. At one end of the spectrum, you got the NHRE, a dysfunctional theocracy-lite run by the Vatican for the protection of religious minorities. At the other end, you got us, a remnant of a defunct hyperpower, run by a dynasty of clones for the protection of ourselves. But we see eye to eye on some things.” His mesh faceplate briefly swung towards her. “Liberty and all that jazz. To make a long story short, other members of the Sovereignty Forum represented to me that they were increasingly concerned about Doug. The NHRE expressed those concerns most convincingly in terms of moral realism.”

  “And?”

  “I realized they had a point. When your game plan involves arming geeks with lethal weapons, based on computer models that get them slaughtered 99 out of a hundred times, you’re doing it wrong.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “I tried to talk the president out of it. So did Bashful Doug.” Elfrida understood that he meant the clone who had saved her life in the water
mine.

  “I’m going to have to call you something else,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Grumpy Doug doesn’t really seem appropriate anymore.”

  “Works for me. I’m still the fourth-generation product of a reproductive cloning program. My momma was forced to gestate a mini-me of a long-dead governor of New Jersey. Yeah, I’m grumpy.”

  “New what?”

  “New Jersey. Used to be a state.”

  “Wasn’t your Founder Doug the last president of America?”

  “That’s what we want you to think. Nope, he was just a governor. But he would have become president, if the federal government had lasted a few years longer.”

  “He had leadership ability?”

  “Vid his speeches. They make the Nuremberg Rallies look like a Toastmasters meeting. Liberty? Independence? Dignity? Snort. Patriotism; well, maybe a little.”

  Elfrida didn’t get most of Grumpy Doug’s references. She reflected that when people came to live in space, they brought their era with them. There was a kind of cultural relativity at work in the solar system, over even small distances. Only a few kilometers of vacuum separated UNVRP HQ from Mt. Gotham, but it was like she’d passed through a time warp from the modern universe into the United States, circa 2170.

  And she wanted to get back home.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “That was the primary filtration system back there. Coming up, secondary filtration.”

  The tunnel dead-ended in a fine-mesh filter. A giant bot arm sliced through the beam of Grumpy Doug’s flashlight, vacuuming silt out of the mesh. Machinery throbbed. The current pulled at Elfrida’s legs, trying to pull her under.

  “Up,” Grumpy Doug said, pushing her at a ladder splarted to the wall. “Maintenance shaft.”

  They climbed into a large room full of desks. It was empty. Screens monitored data, infrared, and optic feeds.

  “I told the guys to knock off early.” Grumpy Doug opened a locker and took out an EVA suit in the Wrightstuff, Inc. colors of red, white, and blue. “Change into this.”

  Little waste had clung to Elfrida’s coverall: the liquid-glass coating let everything slide off. Her clothes underneath were a different story. That leaky seam had let in a lot of wastewater when she fell, and she was also smeared with ordure from the first leg of their journey through the sewers. Shivering, she pulled the EVA suit on over the mess.

  “Uh oh,” Grumpy Doug said, staring at one of the screens.

  “What? What?”

  Grumpy Doug clicked his fingers. An explosion rang out, echoing. Inside Mt. Gotham.

  The screen showed an angle up from the edge of the chasm. The hab’s 24-hour cycle had reached evening. The dimmed sun-lamps mauved the trees overhanging the chasm.

  A fiery trail arced across the roof. Another explosion shook fragments of rock down past the camera.

  “President Doug is upset,” Grumpy Doug said. “This is how he works off his stress. Holo targets. But the rockets are real.”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “Ain’t about you. I bet I know what it is about.” He clicked away to a news feed. “Yup. Look at this. With two hours to go until voting closes, our gal Patel has conceded.”

  “The election? It’s over?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Wait—but I—I thought it wasn’t until tomorrow!”

  “You slept for a day and a half, honey. Medibot gave you a sedative. You needed it.”

  “Oh. God.” Elfrida’s brain reeled, absorbing the new information. “I thought I would still have a chance … the campaign … Dr. Hasselblatter …”

  “Currently on 0.4 percent.”

  “Who’s winning, then?”

  “Guess.”

  “Mork Rapp? Pyls O. Mani?”

  A familiar face appeared on the screen. “Angelica Lin.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Vote-counting software doesn’t lie.”

  Elfrida wheeled away from the screen. “I have to get back.”

  Grumpy Doug led her down a short corridor to an airlock.

  “You’ll find your way home,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. Just be safe.” Grumpy Doug reached into a pocket. “Almost forgot. Your contacts.”

  She popped the baggie of sterile fluid and fitted them into her eyes. “Thank you.” A cherub greeted her. You have one new email, from … “George Washington? Is that you?”

  “Not my real name, obviously. Keep me posted.”

  “Will you be OK?”

  “Sure. I can always talk him down. I’m gonna go do that right now.”

  The airlock valved. Grumpy Doug lifted a hand in farewell.

  Elfrida stumbled out onto the floor of the crater.

  Looking back and up, she saw the night-vision-green massif of Mt. Gotham burgeoning over her. A chartreuse rectangle at ground level, recessed beneath an overhang, was a vehicle airlock, the hab’s official entrance. No one would ever guess what lay within. 10,000 Trapped In Hab Horror … or 10,000 More-Or-Less-OK Colonists?

  She still didn’t know. But she did know that she was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire.

  xxii.

  Jake Vlajkovic-Gates went next door, carrying his baby sister. The street of sandcastles looked as bad as he felt. The lights had been switched on a month ahead of schedule. They hadn’t been serviced, so half of the lights had burnt out the minute they were switched on. In this murk, the sandcastles looked like giant turds. A squirming horde of rats blanketed a dead cow in the alley.

  Jake turned away from the nauseating sight and knocked on the privacy screen of the next-door sandcastle.

  “Mrs. Aaron?”

  She came out, face drawn and wet. She’d lost someone, too.

  “Could I leave Bette with you? Just for a while?”

  “I’m so sorry, Jake,” Mrs. Aaron said. “Both your fathers. It’s beyond belief.”

  “Dad isn’t dead! He’s under arrest.”

  Mrs. Aaron’s mouth folded into a line. Clearly, she thought there wasn’t much difference.

  Jake shifted Bette in his arms. Her diaper was saturated. She wasn’t crying right now, but he knew she’d soon start up again. “Please, please could you take her for a little while?”

  Mrs. Aaron held out her arms. “Come to Auntie, hon.”

  Jake had to peel Bette’s little arms off his neck. He felt terrible about leaving her. He was all she had now.

  But he was all Dad had.

  He raced down to the farm, hoping he wasn’t too late.

  Barely in time. The prisoners were coming down the spiral ramp, guarded by peacekeepers. They’d been arraigned by the new director of UNVRP, and now they were going back into ‘protective custody.’

  Jake darted up the ramp.

  “Major Bourguiba?” He made sure to use the full title of the man he’d known all his life as Mo. “Could I please speak to my dad for a minute?”

  Mo did not make eye contact. He simply kept marching. So did his subordinates. Jake had to fall back or get trampled.

  He retreated to the farm. Some of the hydroponic tanks had been shattered by bullets. Spinach plants lying in wet gravel on the floor seemed to symbolize the rebels’ defeat.

  A couple of Marines ambled up the ramp to meet the peacekeepers. The planet’s Star Force garrison had responded to the peacekeepers’ calls for backup—after it was all over. Stationed in orbit to defend against theoretical PLAN attacks, they hadn’t been prepared for trouble to break out on the surface. But this morning, two GTVs from the Dead Weather had landed in the crater, and now Marines were everywhere, patrolling the corridors and crashing on the mezzanines.

  The two Marines confronting the blue berets were huge Earthborn guys, with biceps bigger than Jake’s thighs. He’d seen men like this in movies, never in real life. They carried Zero.5 kinetic rifles slung on their backs. Encased in navy-b
lue and silver uniforms that doubled as spacesuits, they radiated don’t-give-a-fuck cool.

  Under other circumstances, Jake would have been following them around and vidding their gear. Now, he just saw that they were distracting Mo.

  He darted past them, towards the rear of the column.

  Dad saw him and squeezed between the other prisoners, dragging a guy from the lab backwards after him.

  The peacekeepers were locals, too. They had grown up with Papa as well as Dad. They didn’t step aside, but they didn’t tell Jake to go away, either.

  Jake’s voice got stuck in his throat. Dad had a cut on the side of his face, freshly scabbed over. His clothes looked damp. He smelled of shit. But the thing that really froze Jake’s guts was the taut stare on Dad’s face.

  “Dad?”

  “Jakey. Oh, my son.”

  “Dad, Papa—”

  “Richard? Is he? OK?”

  Jake shook his head.

  Dad sagged like his bones had turned into playdough. The guy behind him stumbled and said, “Ow. Fuck it, Mike.” Jake saw then that they were splarted together. Clear bubbles joined the backs of their thermal sweaters, the backs of their arms and the skin of their hands, their hair, their necks.

  Dad started to reach out to Jake. The movement ended in a jerk, because he couldn’t use his hands independently. “Oh, Jakey, Jakey.”

  “I’m all right,” Jake snapped.

  “Bette?”

  “I took her into the vault. She was fine, just crying a bit. She’s with Mrs. Aaron now.”

  “Richard. How?”

  “The gas. It got into the intake shaft. Everyone ran into the vault. But he stayed to rescue the carpets. We were waiting for him. He never came. He died for his stupid carpets.”

  “Calm down, Jake,” Dad said, glancing at the peacekeepers.

  “Dad, I have to talk to you.”