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

by Felix R. Savage

  The objects were jizo statues, the ancient idols found at Japanese temples and roadside shrines. The volcanic eruption and tsunami that submerged Japan in 2235 had, of course, swept the country’s jizo away. Nowadays, real ones fetched thousands at auction. These were cut-and-paste copies of the famous Nagano Jizo: granite statues of babyish old men with weathered pot-bellies and smug expressions. They wore red aprons and red knitted caps. However, they were each two meters tall, instead of knee-height. Their bulk gave them a forbidding presence. Their shadows stretched out into the Mercurian morning.

  Elfrida remembered her Baba, her great-grandmother, showing her a row of jizo statues on a mountainside in Yamanaka prefecture. Baba had not been a real person, of course. She’d been an MI, existing only in the immersion environment that Elfrida’s father had built to help her learn Japanese.

  The jizo are there to stop evil spirits from coming down from the mountains, Baba had explained. They protect us.

  Elfrida floated closer to the row of jizo in the sim. They squatted on top of a scarp that rose about ten meters above the plain to the west. She searched for a call-out tag that would tell her who’d installed them. This must have been a lot of work. It was hard to imagine the software artist not signing his or her name. But apparently, they hadn’t.

  She blinked the sim away and sat up, a stale taste in her mouth. She must’ve dozed off without intending to. Maybe she’d dreamed the jizo.

  A glance at the radar plot told her she hadn’t dreamed the scarp.

  “Dos Santos, look at that!”

  “Yeah. We can’t descend that. We’re gonna have to go around.”

  “Have we got time for that?”

  “Have you got any other ideas?”

  Elfrida reached into the bags under her feet and came up with a yogurt smoothie. Luke-warm, it slaked her thirst without being satisfying.

  The Sunmersible veered north. Detouring around the scarp would cost them 80 kilometers.

  Elfrida opened her mouth to say that there had to be a better way of doing this. At that moment, the Sunmersible leapt into the air like a startled cat. It hit the ground sideways and rolled over twice before landing lopsidedly on its broken rear axle.

  Elfrida dragged herself, half-stunned, off the floor.

  Dos Santos was screaming at her. “Suit up! Out! Now!” She backflipped out of the driver’s seat. “Where’s my fucking helmet?”

  Elfrida grabbed her own helmet, and Angelica Lin’s handbag. She squeezed into the airlock with dos Santos. “What happened?” She felt slow, stupid. She’d whacked her head on the roof. She was having trouble grasping this new emergency.

  “They’re shooting at us.” Dos Santos fitted her helmet on. Their next words were exchanged by suit-to-suit radio, as the airlock chamber emptied. “I figure they missed by a few centimeters. Next time, they won’t.”

  “Next time?”

  “They fragged the satellites. There were a lot of sats up there. So, there’s now a lot of space debris. They’re probably having to dodge all over the sky to avoid it. That can screw with your targeting.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “At a guess? The Crash Test Dummy. The vinge-classes must’ve taken those GTVs into orbit, docked with the Dummy. I was hoping Star Force wouldn’t let that happen. But when it comes to Star Force, your expectations can never be too low. We can’t stay here; the rear axle’s gone and we’re a sitting duck. Out, out.”

  Elfrida stumbled out into incandescent light. Her suit wailed in disapproval. Dos Santos jumped on tiptoe, grabbing for the edge of the crumpled parasol-cum-solar-array. It came loose from the Sunmersible’s roof and billowed down on top of her.

  “Grab the other side!”

  Elfrida dived for the parasol. Understanding what dos Santos was doing, she wriggled under the heavy folds of material.

  They struggled upright, so that the ex-parasol became a tent with two living poles.

  “Walk.”

  “I’m too hot,” Elfrida’s suit sobbed.

  “Shut up.”

  “What?”

  “I was talking to my suit. How hot is it?”

  “You do not want to know.”

  The rocks they walked upon were so hellishly hot that after just a few minutes, Elfrida began to feel the heat through the soles of her boots. She kept her head down, balancing her share of the parasol’s weight on her shoulders.

  Another tremor shook the ground.

  “There goes the Sunmersible,” dos Santos said.

  “Why aren’t they shooting at us?”

  “Maybe they can’t see us under this thing,” dos Santos said.

  “I guess maybe not.”

  Or maybe, Elfrida thought, they figure it would be a waste of a missile.

  She gritted her teeth. “Ten kilometers to the scarp. We can do it.”

  They walked.

  xxxix.

  ~Frug it! President Doug subvocalized. ~Missed! Doug was close enough to see fresh drops of sweat at his hairline. He suspected that President Doug had not meant to say that. It was a lot harder to control involuntary outbursts when you were subvocalizing, than when you were speaking. As well as which: frug it? No one over the age of eight said that.

  He was still learning new things about his president.

  ~What’d you miss, Doug? Something I should know about?

  President Doug smiled unconvincingly. ~Remember that kinetic weapon I put into orbit last year?

  ~Yeah, the Anti-Impact Monitoring and Automatic Defense System. The poor man’s PORMS.

  ~Frug! Frug! Frug!

  ~What is it, Doug?

  ~It’s gone! It can’t be gone! Re-transmit … come on, come on … I don’t believe this!

  ~Back up. What’s happening?

  ~It must have been the Crash Test Dummy. It took the AIMADS out. I’m gonna crash that sucker into the sun.

  ~Destroying the evidence, huh?

  President Doug’s eyes pleaded for understanding. Forgiveness.

  They knew each other so well.

  But as it turned out, Doug hadn’t known the president well enough.

  From long experience, he kept his emotions out of his subvocalization. ~I’m asking, Doug, because there is going to be the mother of all investigations when this is done. The whole solar system’s gonna want to know what happened on Mercury. And the less evidence there is, the more suspicious folks will be. We will need an airtight story.

  ~We’ve got one.

  ~No, Doug. “Whoops” is not a story. Folks are gonna want a culprit. Someone to bury. Mike Vlajkovic? Not important enough.

  ~Angelica Lin.

  ~Lin? What’s her motive?

  ~Crazy doesn’t need a motive. She believed in equality for robots and MIs. She thought the Heidegger program was just misunderstood. She wanted to give it a second chance. How the fuck would I know?

  There was a ring of truth to that. Lin probably had been involved in some regard. Not that it mattered now.

  ~We can say anything, President Doug insisted. ~The dead can’t defend themselves.

  ~Do you know she’s dead? Because I don’t. I didn’t see her body.

  ~Well, she got away. Took that old tourist bus we sold to UNVRP. But not to worry …

  ~That was her you were shooting at, Doug realized.

  ~And unfortunately, I missed. Lotta space debris up there. And now I’ve lost the AIMADS … Worry clouded President Doug’s face. ~But she can’t survive, he subvocalized—again, talking more to himself than Doug. ~She’s out there in the frugging sunlight!

  Sucked to be Angelica Lin. But Doug didn’t really care about her right now. Maybe she’d been tricked into pushing the wrong button. But she hadn’t known where the other button was.

  The one that mattered.

  The one that switched the Heidegger program off.

  ~How’d you find out about that, Doug? he subvocalized.

  ~About what?

  ~The secret of your historic victory.
The off switch.

  A smirk flickered across President Doug’s lips. Doug saw that he was still proud of what he’d done, and that was the worst revelation of all. ~I keep up with developments in the field.

  ~The field of what? Genocide?

  Regretting that jab, Doug glanced down at the vinge-classes piled on the Barge of Shame. Hundreds of people were hanging over the river, vidding them. When Mt. Gotham’s comms were restored, these images would flash around the solar system, proving that American grit and technology had triumphed, once again, over evil.

  Except the real evil was right here, so close that Doug could smell it.

  ~I did it for us, Doug! The president sensed his revulsion, although he hadn’t expressed it. ~For our children.

  Doug was no longer listening. His heartbeat raced. Unconsciously, he drove his hands into his pockets. The man in front of him, his genetic spit and image, had vanished entirely up his own ass. When had it happened? Impossible, now, to look back and say, this was where he went wrong.

  Maybe President Doug’s shadowy cronies on Luna had whispered in his ear, corrupting him with promises of wealth, sovereignty, and He3-fuelled market power that would enable him to restore the United States of America.

  Or maybe the problem was in his genes. The genes Doug shared.

  But to think that would be to succumb to despair. His buddies in the NHRE had warned him time and time again. A little bit of cynicism goes a long way. Too much, and you risk turning into the thing you hate.

  ~Bro, we’ve been bleeding red ink. President Doug was still subvocalizing at him. ~I do not want to start chasing down asteroid colonists and repossessing their rocks. Those folks out on the NEOs are the future—

  ~Of the second American empire?

  ~Paraterraforming. We need every gram of He3 on this planet to make it happen. Anyway, why should the supermajors get it? They own everything else already. Private property is under siege. The little guy can’t catch a break.

  Doug believed all that, too. That was why he’d been enthusiastic about the He3 mine in the first place. That was why he hadn’t breathed a word to anyone about the Tolkien Crater deposits. There were sure to be more deposits in the other permanently shadowed polar craters. And it all belonged to Wrightstuff, Inc. They’d been here first.

  Doug took a moment, scratching the little scar on his chin, which had been inflicted on him by a doctor thirty years ago, after the boy who would become president had fallen off his bike and cut himself.

  The Secret Service was watching him, but no one else was. The crowd roared ecstatically, less in response to Dopey Doug (a foamcore moose would’ve been more charismatic) than because patriotism, the opiate of space colonists, had kicked in. Flags rippled red, white, and blue on the cliffs. The balconies vibrated with clapping hands and whooping mouths. These folks had no idea that hundreds of people just like themselves had died, and hundreds more were still in danger.

  “Liberty,” President Doug said, echoing Dopey Doug under his breath. “Independence. Freedom. These are the values we …”

  “Aw, shit, you fucking murderer,” Doug said. He swung President Doug around into a face-to-face embrace, and stabbed him under the ribs with his cutter laser.

  President Doug died instantly. He slumped on Doug’s shoulder, his last hot breath rattling into Doug’s ear. Doug shoved the body away from him, onto the nearest Secret Service guy. He jumped up onto the podium. He knew he’d done the wrong thing in a moment of blind rage, but it had been for the right reasons. He now had a few seconds to convince everyone else of that.

  He elbowed Dopey Doug off the podium. The crowd murmured in confusion. The illusion was breaking down.

  “This is an emergency announcement,” Doug shouted. The tannoy amplified his words around the inside of the mountain. “The residents of UNVRP HQ need our help. Everyone with access to a fabber, listen up. I need you to download the template I’m gonna send you right now—here it comes. It is a template for an EVA suit. Basic, but it functions, so get printing. Folks, brethren and sistren, fellow Americans … we are going outside.”

  A crashing noise interrupted him. The phavatars in the Barge of Shame stood up, shaking off splinters of splart. The ones that had been on the bottom of the pile still had pieces of deck stuck to their frames.

  “Whoops,” Doug said. Again, his words reverberated throughout Mt. Gotham. “Should’ve used more splart.”

  The phavatars cannonballed into the water. Too heavy to swim, they vanished from sight.

  People craned over the retaining walls. The first phavatar resurfaced, leaping vertically out of the river like a sludge-covered ball of wire.

  The laughter stopped. The stampede started.

  Microseconds after that, the shooting began.

  Doug leaned on the podium, momentarily overwhelmed. Doug, he told himself, in hindsight, it wasn’t real smart to kill the guy who had the off switch.

  Then the world punched him in the chest, knocking him off the podium.

  He would never know who shot him.

  xl.

  Under the parasol, Elfrida and dos Santos shuffled along in blackness hemmed by threads of light. Elfrida shared her copy of the sim with dos Santos so they could see where they were going. With the sim enabled, they seemed to be walking across a plain resembling a salt flat, towards the row of jizo statues.

  At each step, they had to kick the parasol forward a bit. “It’s like walking in a long dress,” dos Santos said. “The kind of thing you have to wear on Luna.” She changed her avatar’s clothing to a gown in the Shackleton City style, and kicked playfully at its hem.

  In the sim, dos Santos looked like her old self, just like Elfrida remembered her from Botticelli Station. Tawny skin, shaggy blonde curls. Laughter lines around a generous mouth. But this playful woman, Elfrida knew, had a survival instinct second to none.

  Stick with me and we’ll live through this.

  The pain in Elfrida’s feet mocked her thoughts. Her suit had been whimpering for some time that the grips of its boots were being degraded. Now it was telling her that they were pretty much melted through. “Sorry, can we stop for a minute? My boots …”

  She blinked the sim out of the way to get a look at her soles. This time, her suit’s hysteria had not been exaggerated. The gecko grips of her boots were gone, melted off. She was walking on the exterior liner, which had a higher heat tolerance, but was showing signs of scorching.

  “You know what this means,” dos Santos said. She had taken advantage of the halt to check her own boots.

  “What?”

  “Crawl.”

  They rolled the parasol into a tube and crawled inside it, as if they were hamsters in a wheel. After an eternity of tortuous progress, they labored up to the backs of the jizo statues. It was 7:38 in the morning, Mercury time.

  Elfrida’s head collided with something that wasn’t there.

  “Ow!” She blinked the sim away. “I just bumped into …”

  They untangled themselves from the parasol and lifted its front edge off the ground.

  The pool of shadow now engulfed a toaster.

  “Oh my God,” Elfrida said giddily. “My parents have one just like that! Well, ours doesn’t have a screen. This must be the new model.”

  They lifted the edge of the parasol at other points. They’d crawled into a junkyard. One of the local OEMs had abandoned several thousand toasters, plus a thousand or so washing-machines, on top of the scarp.

  “Cancelled order?” Elfrida pondered. “Or maybe they were defective.”

  “Not defective.” Dos Santos had dragged one of the toasters in under the sunshade. She pried at its battery cover.

  “There are laws against dumping,” Elfrida said severely. “Ugh! Fouling up the landscape. Just like on Earth during the Industrial Age. You’re supposed to recycle.”

  “Recycling isn’t always cost-effective. Fashions change fast. One month, dumb appliances are in. The next, everyone wants their to
aster to be able to sing Broadway tunes, greet you by name, and throw your toast across the kitchen.”

  “I could do with some toast. With melted cheese.” Elfrida felt slightly delirious. “A grilled cheese sandwich on Weissbrot, like my mom makes.” She sucked on her suit’s rehydration nipple, watching dos Santos fiddle with the toaster. “Shall we try and climb down the scarp? It’s got to be cooler in the shade.”

  “Yeah, let’s do that. And I’m taking this. In fact, I’m taking a bunch of them.”

  “Why?”

  Dos Santos stood up, lifting the parasol on her shoulders. “These aren’t dumb appliances. They’ve got radio frequency chips inside. If I link enough of them together, I bet I can make a transmitter.”

  “What about batteries? They don’t ship them with batteries.”

  “Who needs batteries, when you’ve got a solar generator?” Dos Santos twitched the cable dangling from the underside of the parasol. “I can hook the toasters up to this. Come on.”

  For the first time since they left the Sunmersible, Elfrida allowed herself to feel hopeful.

  They crawled through the junkyard, collecting toasters along the way. At the edge of the scarp, they discovered that the sim had exaggerated the drop ahead of them. The satellite maps were out of date. This part of the cliff had collapsed under the weight of the toasters and washing-machines—or more likely, whatever heavy machine dumped them here. The result was a scooped-out slope, like a landslide on Earth. They scrambled down with greater ease than expected, carrying the parasol with a dozen toasters bundled up in it.

  “It’s about time something went our way,” dos Santos said jubilantly.

  A narrow strip of shadow traced the north-south line of the scarp.

  Elfrida clambered part-way back up the landslide, staying in the shadow. A shard of rock stuck out from the landslide, horizontal. She ducked into the black shadow underneath, ignoring dos Santos’s warning that the rocks might not be stable—

  —and fell straight down.

  She landed on one foot and a knee. On Earth, she would have broken something.