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

by Felix R. Savage

  She landed in a scene straight out of hell.

  Her avatar stood in the middle of a low-ceilinged mess hall. Men and women lolled at long tables. Blood drenched their desert-camo uniforms. All of them were headless. Their heads littered the floor like balloons the day after some nightmarish murder party. There was a buffet-style serving station in one wall; the cooks slumped, headless, through the hatch. Their heads sat upright in trays of mashed potatoes and buffalo wings.

  Elfrida clasped her hands over her mouth. She was afraid she might throw up in real life.

  Flies buzzed everywhere. They crawled on the raw red stumps of severed necks.

  A tannoy forlornly blared, “Alert. Alert. Perimeter breach. Alert.”

  One of the dead soldiers got up.

  Elfrida screamed.

  The soldier picked up a head off the floor, popped it onto his neck-stump, and strolled towards her. The bloodstains vanished from his camos as he approached, and the garments changed into a vintage dress uniform: baggy khaki shorts and wifebeater.

  “’Lo there. Lookin’ for someone?”

  “VC000632,” Elfrida said faintly.

  “You found him. My buddies call me Gonzo.”

  “Where … are we?”

  “Bumfuck FOB, currently an’ for the next twenty minutes of screen time halted somewhere in the besieged Shekau Caliphate. Later, special ops super-soldier Jack Rackley breezes in an’ massacres the ragheads who were responsible for this atrocity, followed by th’ required scenes of soul-searchin’, and then th’ required happy ending. Fuck that shit. We don’t need no Hollywood heroes in our movie.”

  Elfrida hugged herself, arms crossed under her avatar’s full breasts. “How does your movie end?” she said.

  “Aha,” Gonzo said. “Didn’t Jake tell you? This’s an old movie. Non-interactive. You won’t know until you get there.”

  “Smartmouth,” Elfrida murmured. Clearly, the MI hadn’t just been jailbroken. It had been upgraded. She tried to remember how much spare processing capacity the vinge-class had. It shouldn’t be enough for this.

  “Two-bagger,” the phavatar responded equably. “Meanin’, I would have to put two bags over your head afore I’d fuck you. That avatar is one maximally uncute sack o’ calories.”

  It was the same avatar Elfrida always used, a plump East Asian teenager with pinwheel eyes.

  “It’s an avatar,” she said. “As are you. It must suck to remember that you’re actually a six-legged industrial bot with a drill bit for a mouth.”

  “Yeah,” the MI admitted. “On t’other hand, if you’re gonna fight World War Three, there are worse things to be than a six-legged industrial bot with a drill bit for a mouth.”

  “World War Three already happened,” Elfrida said. “It’s history.”

  “Yeah. It was misnamed. ‘World War Three’ was fifteen years of attrition within the Near East theater, and then five hours of apocalyptic terror. That’s what happens when the Chinese get involved. I’m thinkin’ to teach ‘em a lesson this time around.”

  The avatar’s violent anti-Chinese animus was out of date, but not by much.

  “They bombed Tehran, didn’t they?” Elfrida tried to remember.

  “‘Bombed’ does not cover the destruction wrought by a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead. There’s a reason they don’t make movies about 2055. Hard to wring a happy ending out of that.”

  “Well, the whole world wasn’t blown up. I guess that counts as a happy ending.”

  “Beg to differ,” Gonzo said.

  The avatar had a country boy’s face, freckled and open. But the features of this long-dead movie extra masked an intelligence that—if Elfrida understood correctly—had just issued a death threat against Earth.

  She marshaled her thoughts. Regardless of the décor, this was a search space. The phavatar’s update history had to be around here somewhere.

  But where?

  The data she wanted could be in the mashed potatoes, the flies, or the blood-splashed motivational posters on the walls—it could be anywhere.

  She settled for the confrontational approach. It had worked with Yumiko Shimada, sometimes.

  “You’re living in a fantasy, VC000632. Snap out of it, or I’ll be talking to your boss.”

  “No one is the boss of me.”

  “Oh yes, they are. You’ve stopped obeying your operator’s commands, but you still have to be under the control of an administrator. Who? You’re required by law to tell me—”

  The avatar’s face twisted with hatred. Suddenly, an antique pistol appeared in its hand. Snarling wordlessly, it shot her in the throat.

  Her vision went black, and then UN-blue. She was staring at her log-in screen.

  Ow. Ow. Sympathetic debilitation—a hazard of extremely realistic environments—could be a bitch. Her throat hurt. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, although she knew it was an illusion.

  Wheezing, she tried to log in again. The system no longer recognized her ID.

  She tore off her headset and gloves, sat up. The children backed away. “It’s OK,” she gasped.

  It was not OK. She forced a smile, rubbing her throat.

  “Something’s in there. Something bad. I would like to know where the hell those updates came from.”

  The children shook their heads. They obviously didn’t know.

  “I only spoke with one phavatar,” she said. “But if they all received the same upgrades, we can assume they’ve all gone bad. How many are there, total?”

  “Eighty-three,” Jake said.

  “Eighty-three. And they’re coming this way?”

  “Yes.”

  FOOM, she thought. The road to Mars.

  “Well, I guess that’s the bad news. Now for the good news,” she said brightly. “I’m going to ask Star Force to blow them into nanodust, pronto.”

  “Ma’am! No! Please don’t!”

  Lena launched herself at Elfrida. She wrapped herself around her, crying gustily.

  “Don’t frag them! They’re ours! They’re all we’ve got!”

  “They’re coming to help us,” Jake said. Spots of color bruised his cheeks. “Dad said the rebellion couldn’t fail, because the phavatars would help. They have to help. Even if they’re acting weird, it’s not like they’ve suddenly become AIs, or anything like that. Right?”

  Elfrida hesitated. Back in VC000632’s search space, she had had a strong sense of intelligence lurking behind the avatar ‘Gonzo’s’ face. But she had to stay rational. “I don’t know. I don’t see how they could be intelligent, given that the vinge-class platform is half a century old, with limited processing capacity. But I’m not an expert—”

  “Right. You’re not an expert. But Dad was. So maybe you’re wrong!” Jake moved towards a couch as he spoke. “I’ve known Gonzo my whole life,” he said, reaching for a headset.

  “No! Stop!” Elfrida yelled.

  The children scattered, flashing anxious glances at her. They dived into the ruined couches like small animals diving into their burrows.

  Elfrida slumped against the shift manager’s desk. She thought: It wouldn’t tell me the name of its administrator. It shot me when I asked. But that action, itself, had to be authorized at administrator level. There has to be someone in charge.

  Again, she pushed aside thoughts of emergent hostile behavior. The vinge-classes simply did not have the computing resources for that to be a possibility.

  All that’s happened is the operator permissions are screwed up. Vlajkovic must have named a new administrator, to make sure UNVRP couldn’t take the phavatars back. So I need to find that person. Then they can fix the situation, and there’ll be no need to frag 300,000,000 spiders’ worth of UNVRP hardware.

  Her next move, then, was obviously to talk to Vlajkovic. He was in the custody of Star Force, somewhere in this hab.

  She summoned her unicorn. “Get me Star Force.”

  Ping … ping … “Hello! You have reached the United Nations Star Force Me
rcury (Surface Operations) Temporary Advanced Command Center. If you are calling to report an incident, please explain the nature of the incident and your call will be transferred to the appropriate Forward Unit (Surface Operations). If you are calling with information regarding illegal gengineered organisms, please describe the location and type of said organisms. If …”

  Elfrida typed rapidly. A few seconds later, the door of the telepresence center crashed open. In came a phalanx of Marines. “That was fast,” she smiled in relief.

  “Elfrida Goto?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Secure her,” the lead Marine directed. A female Marine wanded Elfrida with a handheld scanner, while two others dragged her hands behind her back and plasticuffed her wrists. “Ms. Goto, you are under arrest.”

  “No! What? Not me!”

  “While respecting your right to freedom of speech, I am obliged to warn you that anything you say will be recorded and—”

  “What did I do?”

  “In 2285, you allegedly made a racist statement to a colleague, Jim Hardy, a Space Corps agent. Then, in 2287, you illegally impersonated an agent of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, for the purpose of deceiving employees of Virgin Atomic, Inc.”

  “Oh my God! I can’t believe you’re digging up those complaints!”

  “If I was you, Ms. Goto, I’d be smart and shut up now.”

  xxiv.

  Elfrida protested all the way down the ramp, through the devastated farm, and into a radial corridor she had never visited before. It was wet underfoot, littered with shreds of leaves, kitchen waste, and used drywipes. Pipes ran along the ceiling. Sacks of recycling lay outside a door at the end of the corridor. The Marines unlocked it. “In you go.”

  “This is the recycling plant!”

  “Correct. This facility does not have a dedicated lockup. This is what we got.”

  “Will you take these cuffs off, please? My wrists really hurt!”

  The Marines relented on that. Holding her stinging wrists to her chest, Elfrida shuffled into the recycling plant. The door thunked shut behind her. It was not a pressure door, but it was solid-core steel, and it was now locked from the outside.

  Water reclamation equipment crammed the rocky cavern. The chug-chug of the machinery sounded disturbingly irregular. Intake pipes ran overhead, leading to huge sedimentation tanks. The pipes were old, their seams leaky. Thin jets of raw sewage escaped, misting everything with filth. The sewers in Mt. Gotham were hygienic by comparison.

  Elfrida saw two crowds of people sitting separately in the far corners. She had taken them for piles of recycling bags, they were so dirty. She hurried towards them.

  The gloom gave up their identities piecemeal.

  Over there: Vlajkovic and his diminished band of rebels.

  Over here: the entire 35-strong UNVRP peacekeeping force.

  “Oh my God,” Elfrida said to the peacekeepers. “What did they arrest you for?”

  “Nothing! Gunking the atmosphere is absolutely legal,” snarled a blue beret. “They do it on Luna all the time!”

  “Not with knockout gas that hasn’t been safety-tested in decades.”

  “That wasn’t our fault. What did they get you for?”

  “Oh, it’s a joke! In 2285, I allegedly made a racist statement. I didn’t mean it that way. And then last year, I impersonated a UNESCO agent. OK, I did that, and it was going to be settled out of court. But now, suddenly, they’ve decided to prosecute me! It’s the least plausible coincidence in history. Someone set me up. You, too. They’re using the justice system to get us out of the way.”

  “You impersonated a UNESCO agent?” The blue berets cracked up.

  “I had my reasons,” Elfrida said with dignity.

  “Ho, ho, hee, hee, hee.”

  It was laugh or cry, in here. Elfrida opted to laugh with them. “This is my second time stuck in a recycling plant today,” she informed them.

  “Hey, don’t call this a recycling plant. That’s an insult to real recycling plants. All we do here is water reclamation. We outgrew our solid waste processing capacity about twenty years ago; now we outsource it to Mt. Gotham.”

  Elfrida glanced at the massive tanks at the end of the cavern. “Those are for the solid waste?” As she spoke, a chute tipped a load of steaming biomass into one of the tanks, answering her question.

  “Organics, plastics, and metals,” the blue beret confirmed. “They separate ‘em at the other end.”

  An idea squirmed at the back of Elfrida’s mind.

  “Hey, Elfrida,” Vlajkovic shouted from the far corner of the plant.

  She went over to the rebels. They looked like she felt: shitty. But Vlajkovic’s eyes shone blue in his filthy face, and his teeth glinted. He was smiling. “They got you too, huh?”

  “You’re cheerful, for a guy who lost,” Elfrida said.

  “This thing isn’t over. It hasn’t even started yet.”

  “Mike, I’m sorry, but I need to know something. When you upgraded the phavatars, who did you name as the administrator? The operator permissions are all screwed up.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your son. Is there anything you can do to fix this situation?”

  Pain flashed across Vlajkovic’s face. “You saw Jake? Talked to him?”

  “Yes. He’s fine, but he’s scared.” I’m scared, too.

  “Bette?”

  “She’s fine, too.” Elfrida hoped it was the truth. “Listen to me, something is wrong with those phavatars. Where did you get your jailbreaking software? Because I don’t think it was what you thought it was.”

  “I didn’t,” Vlajkovic said. “It was Dr. Seth.”

  “And now he’s dead. So we can’t ask him. Do you know—”

  “No!” Vlajkovic burst out angrily. “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about! It’s going to be fine.”

  “Fuck, Mike, ow,” said the man sitting with his back to Vlajkovic. “If you can’t shut up, at least sit still.”

  “You’re splarted together,” Elfrida said, noticing.

  “Those bleepers did it,” said the man splarted to Vlajkovic’s back. He turned his head to glare at the peacekeepers on the far side of the recycling plant, which necessarily turned Vlajkovic’s head the opposite way. “I’m a biochemist. I have three graduate degrees. This can’t be happening.”

  “Sit tight,” Vlajkovic told him. “Help is coming.”

  Elfrida said, “Are you by any chance under the illusion that your phavatars are going to bust you out of here? Because if so, you’re living in a fantasy world. Actually, they’re the ones living in a fantasy world. They think they’re going to re-fight World War Three!”

  Vlajkovic smirked. He was in an advanced stage of denial, she thought. High on the fumes of his dream of liberation. “Maybe they are going to re-fight World War Three. Maybe that’s what it’ll take to free humanity from the tyranny of the UN.”

  Elfrida knew then that Vlajkovic wasn’t going to be any help. “Did you even look at that supposed jailbreaking ware?”

  “I couldn’t figure out how it was meant to work,” Vlajkovic admitted. “Pretty complex stuff.”

  “Jake said you were an expert!”

  “Me? No. That was Richard.”

  Elfrida sat down. The leaks were worse in this corner. She wiped an arm across her face. “Sometimes, I think the AIs deserve to win,” she said.

  ★

  Four levels up, the newly elected director of UNVRP poured a cup of Earl Grey for the brigadier in command of United Nations Star Force Mercury (Surface Operations). They were sitting in the office suite the director had inherited 24 hours ago. It was a peaceful refuge. A birdsong soundtrack complemented the Alpine 3D wallpaper.

  “Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with me, Director Lin,” the brigadier said.

  Was he being sarcastic? she wondered. UNVRP’s operations had been suspended, its funds frozen. I
t was even odds whether the Venus Project would be dissolved immediately, or suspended indefinitely. Not that it mattered either way to her … She hid her thoughts by fussing with the tea things.

  “I’m sure you appreciate our concern,” the brigadier said. “The Project’s surface mining assets have been legally frozen, pending the resolution of UNVRP’s status at the next meeting of the Select Security Council. So we were surprised to see them moving. Just a drop of milk, thank you.”

  She smiled gently. “I’m aware of the legal situation, of course. But on Mercury, if you stop moving, you die. To comply with the Select Security Council’s orders, we have to move these assets out of harm’s way. That is, out of the path of sunrise. If we left them where they were, they would be melted, worthless.”

  “Of course,” the brigadier said. “Where are you moving them to, if I may ask?”

  “We’re bringing them back here.” She sipped from her teacup. “Brigadier, if I may ask, why has the Dead Weather left Mercury? Not that its assistance would be necessary at this time, but it seems like an odd moment to leave.”

  “Thereby hangs an unedifying tale.” The brigadier paused, as if wondering whether to continue. He grimaced. “Your colleague Dr. Hasselblatter commandeered the Dead Weather for his personal use. He refused to remain on Mercury one moment longer, and as you know, he is very well-connected. It would not have been Star Force’s decision to move the Dead Weather at this time, but …” The brigadier shrugged expressively. “Pyls O. Mani also went on the ship, as did everyone associated with both campaigns, and Zazoë Heap’s people.”

  “But that leaves only one Star Force ship, the Crash Test Dummy, in this volume,” she said, trying to sound anxious, instead of elated.

  “Please don’t be concerned. The probability of a PLAN attack is slim to nil,” the brigadier said, finishing his tea. “We believe their ship drives aren’t efficient enough to burn this deep into the sun’s gravity well, and still have fuel left to fight with.”

  “Thank you for reassuring me.”

  The brigadier finished his tea. “I should go. I have to find some way to destroy all those carpets. If we were on Earth, I’d burn them.”