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

by Felix R. Savage

  There lay Elfrida’s avatar, styled like a pudgy Japanese teenager.

  He ran to her, stumbling through the heaps of toasters. “I thought you’d never get around to using the edit function,” he said, instead of any of the romantic things he’d been thinking.

  “Mendoza?” she wrote, in red text.

  He still had his visored helm on. He pushed the visor back.

  She picked herself up, straightened her miniskirt, and threw herself at him. Her arms wrapped insubstantially around his armored bulk. He wished like hell he had sensory feedback in this thing.

  A text from Kiyoshi appeared in his HUD area, spoiling what might otherwise have been a romantic moment. “Jun’s pretty much wrapped this thing up. Those last three hostiles are the MI personalities of the last three vinge-class phavatars. They’re real. The others were just phaeries. Anyway, Jun is disabling the daemons that the Heidegger program installed in the phavatars. Then he’ll be able to control them himself.”

  Joy filled Mendoza at this news. “Come here,” he told Elfrida. “Look.”

  He drew her to the edge of the scarp.

  The three surviving grunts knelt in a circle with their hands behind their backs. Over their heads, a cloud towered, growing. It was like a hole in the sim, a demented blizzard of zeros and ones, but it had a shape, and it was the shape of a mushroom.

  One of the knights stood looking up at it. He seemed very small, overshadowed by that storm of organized data.

  “That’s Jun,” Mendoza said.

  “Jun Yonezawa?”

  “No other.”

  “What’s he doing? Is it—safe?”

  “No, it’s not safe. But he knows what he’s doing.”

  Hands on hips, Jun stared up at the mushroom cloud. Then he laughed. “Totally cheesy,” he said, and then in a different, harder voice, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

  All in an instant, the cloud broke up. It fled to the four corners of the sky and disintegrated.

  The three grunts fell on their faces like puppets whose strings had been cut.

  Jun knelt over them. He took his helmet off and made the sign of the cross. Then he straightened the bodies and folded their hands on their chests. He walked back towards the scarp.

  The other knights were standing around the hole that the avatars had dug, rubbing their chins.

  Mendoza nudged Elfrida in the ribs. “Is that where you are?”

  She nodded.

  Jun looked up and waved.

  “There’s a kind of a crevice at the foot of the scarp,” Elfrida said. “I guess whoever dumped those toasters, they collapsed the scarp, so it got covered over. There’s like twenty centimeters of shadow left. That’s where I am. I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.”

  “Stay that way,” Mendoza said. “We’re coming to get you out.”

  ★

  As soon as the Wakizashi landed on the surface, Jun commanded the three surviving phavatars to break into Elfrida’s hiding-place and rescue her. They carried her to the Superlifter, bundled like a baby in the solar parasol she’d been using for insulation. The temperature on the surface was now 190° and climbing. The phavatars, tough as they were, had begun to break down.

  Jun commanded them to return to the crevice and fetch the object Elfrida had almost died for. It was an insulated hard-shell suitcase. It contained the portable supercomputer that hosted the source code of the Heidegger program, version 2.0.

  The phavatars dropped it in the open. Kiyoshi went out and fragged it with a grenade launcher. He was only outside the ship for twenty seconds, but when he returned, his EVA suit was burnt black all down one side.

  “We’re leaving,” he gasped. “This place is hotter than hell.”

  ★

  Mendoza cradled Elfrida in his arms as the Wakizashi burnt back into orbit on a ballistic trajectory, sparing them the high gees associated with a vertical launch. You didn’t have to worry about soaking surface facilities with radiation, here.

  Kiyoshi and Jun chattered in Japanese. They were laughing, in high spirits. The Heidegger program, version 2.0, was now a molten lump of metal. They’d done what they came to do.

  So had Mendoza.

  Nothing had ever felt as good as the weight of Elfrida’s body in his lap. He lowered his head to feel her breath on his face.

  “You came for me,” she croaked.

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  “I thought I was gonna die.”

  Her gray complexion and cracked lips testified to how close she’d come. She’d been stuck in that crevice for about 50 hours, and her EVA suit had not been able to shield her fully from the relentlessly climbing temperature on the surface. The Superlifter’s medibot had diagnosed dehydration and shock, and recommended a sedative. Elfrida had refused.

  “What happened to my suitcase?” she asked in a rasping voice, unlike her own.

  “We fragged it,” Mendoza said.

  “Good.”

  Her eyes closed. Mendoza thought, Maybe she’ll sleep now.

  She had fled onto the dayside with the suitcase to stop the Heidegger program’s phavatars from taking it and escaping off-planet. Vinge-classes … they’re bigger in real life ... Two meters at the shoulder, as strong as backhoes. Before the Superlifter landed, the last three surviving vinge-classes had been trying to break into Elfrida’s shelter to retrieve the suitcase. They’d almost got to her. Almost.

  Mendoza fussily adjusted the drip that was feeding saline fluid into her arm. She winced. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “Where’s my thing?”

  “What thing?”

  “That.”

  She weakly reached for the thing she had brought on board with her.

  The head of Angelica Lin.

  Elfrida had not been alone on her trek across the dayside. Angelica Lin had gone with her, or chased her, or maybe it had been the other way round. Mendoza suspected he’d never know exactly what had gone down between the two women. He didn’t want to know. It had ended with Lin dead, and her severed head on board the Wakizashi.

  Roughly hacked off with a cutter laser, the grisly object had bled all over the cockpit before Kiyoshi caught it and stuffed it into a ziploc. It was now rolling around the floor. Elfrida kept reaching for it, so Mendoza, stifling his disgust, grabbed it for her. She tucked it under her arm like a teddy-bear.

  “Her name wasn’t Angelica Lin,” she croaked. “It was Gloria dos Santos. I knew her … before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before she got all that surgery.”

  Kiyoshi, overhearing, cracked up. “That’s one hell of a neck job you gave her. Talk about going under the knife.” After a second, Elfrida started to laugh, too. The two of them hooted until Elfrida began to cough. Mendoza patted her on the back.

  “How’d you get here, anyway?” she said to Kiyoshi. “It’s like you’re my guardian angel or something.”

  “Some angel I’d make,” Kiyoshi said, sobering. “No, the one you should thank is him.” He nodded at Mendoza.

  Elfrida gazed up into Mendoza’s face. The look in her eyes nearly made him bust out bawling. It was what he had hoped and longed to get from her one day. A look of love.

  Because he sucked at romantic moments, he indicated the bagged-up head on Elfrida’s lap. “It’s tragic, isn’t it? I mean, her part in the whole thing … I guess she trusted Derek Lorna, believed they were in it together. And then he betrayed her.”

  “Yeah,” Elfrida said. “But she deserved it. She murdered Charles K. Pope.”

  “Whoa. Why?”

  Kiyoshi said, “To take his place, obviously.”

  “Actually, no,” Elfrida said. “Because she wanted to be with Derek Lorna. She thought they were going to do great things together. So she installed the program he sent her, without even running an anti-virus scan. And that’s not tragic. That’s just stupid.”

  She began to cough. Mendoza patted her back, fed her gatorade from a pouch. The Super
lifter docked with the Monster in a violent smooch of metal.

  “Sorry,” Kiyoshi said. “Now, Elfrida, listen, we haven’t got direct docking capability. The Monster’s airlocks are so old, their seals don’t fit modern ones like on a Superlifter’s. So we’re gonna have to spacewalk to the operations module. Think you can manage that?”

  “Sure,” Elfrida said, although she looked grayer than ever. “Floating is easier than walking.” She held the bagged-up head out to Mendoza. “Could you carry this for me?”

  As they floated across to the operations module, in the shadow of the Monster’s bulk, the eyes of Angelica Lin—no, Gloria dos Santos—reflected the ship’s exterior warning lights, seeming to wink redly at Mendoza.

  Kiyoshi said via suit-to-suit radio, “Make sure you don’t drop that. It’s going to put Derek Lorna in jail.”

  “Huh?” Mendoza said.

  “Lin, dos Santos, whatever her name really was ... she must have had a BCI. It’ll have records of her contacts with Lorna. Hard evidence. That’s what the courts look for.”

  Mendoza looked at the head with a fresh perspective. It struck him as disgusting to steal a dead woman’s memories. He switched channels. “Jun?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is this for real? Are we going to cut her head open and extract her BCI?”

  “Absolutely not,” Jun said. “We’ll have to deliver it intact to the Interplanetary Court of Justice. We obviously can’t take it to Earth ourselves. And I wouldn’t want to entrust it to a drone delivery service. But I’ll think of something. Anyway, it can go in the freezer for now.”

  “ … OK.”

  “I know what’s on your mind,” Jun said. “They’re dragging us down to their level. But Elfrida almost died for this. We can’t just throw it away because we have high moral principles about not violating the dead.”

  Mendoza reached the airlock ahead of the others. He pulled Elfrida the rest of the way in. His admiration for her increased by the moment. Of course she hadn’t taken Gloria dos Santos’s head as some kind of grisly souvenir. She had taken it precisely because she knew it contained the evidence that would convict Derek Lorna of genocide.

  A medibot met them on the inside of the airlock. Elfrida gratefully reclined into its embrace. “First time I’ve ever been on your ship,” she croaked to Kiyoshi. “Wow, is this place a mess, or what?”

  She drifted into unconsciousness.

  Mendoza followed the medibot to the Monster’s sickbay and watched it transfer her into a temperature-controlled sleeping-bag, which was secured to the wall amid a platoon of advanced medibots, bioprinters, and scanners, many still adorned with factory inspection seals. None of this fancy equipment would do Elfrida any good. The prescription for shock and dehydration had not changed in centuries: rest, fluids, more rest, and more fluids.

  He kissed her forehead and left her to sleep.

  ★

  Fr. Lynch caught him outside the sickbay. “Finally, you’re back. Thank God you were able to rescue her.”

  “Father, what do you think about mutilating the head of Angelica Lin, sorry, Gloria dos Santos, to get at her BCI?”

  “From a theological standpoint, it’s wrong to mutilate a corpse. But it’s also true that her BCI is not part of her body, so removing it would not count as mutilation. In fact, some in the Church hold that implants and augments are unnatural to begin with.”

  “Is that why you don’t have a BCI?”

  “No. My own views on that question are not absolutist. I just don’t trust their security. Now, if you’ve got a moment, Mendoza—”

  “But was it wrong to cut her head off in the first place?”

  “Of course it was.”

  “Then Elfrida—”

  “She’s not a Christian, is she? You can’t hold her to the same standards. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Actually, she’s been baptized into the Faith,” Mendoza said. “It happened before I met her. I don’t think she took it seriously. It was operationally convenient, or something. But … OK, OK.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Go on, Father. Sorry.”

  “I need your help with something. Now.”

  “What is it?”

  “I need you to break into a corporate database and copy certain relevant portions of their records.”

  “A local database? Everything down there is a smouldering ruin. The Crash Test Dummy fragged all the industrial facilities.”

  “Not quite. It didn’t touch any of the facilities belonging to Wrightstuff, Inc.”

  xvii.

  In the Wrightstuff, Inc. polar habitat of Mt. Gotham, a man named Doug Wright lay on a stretcher cranked up to a sitting position. He was monitoring multiple screens in a situation room full of holographs that morphed and danced but didn’t really tell you anything you could not get from a written report. This had not been his choice of décor.

  He had hardly slept since disaster struck Mercury. The other Wrightstuff habs at the north and south poles were holding on. Doug had instructed them to send out EVA teams to search for survivors at the factories in the twilight zone, before the terminator advanced far enough to swallow the sites in lethal daylight. The reports from the EVA teams had now started to come in. They made depressing reading, but Doug was forcing himself to peruse every word.

  At least, that was what he’d been doing before the priest called him.

  Doug frowned at the figure projected on the virtual comms screen of his retinal implants. The dog-collar said Roman Catholic. The short-sleeved black shirt and slacks said business. The grim, square-jawed visage said trouble.

  “Do I know you?” Doug said.

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just need a quick word,” the priest said. “It’s about Yoshikawa Spaceport.”

  “The spaceport on the nightside. A few of the Marines made it there. You over there now? Are you hit?”

  “No, the spaceport is undamaged, and that’s what I want to ask you about.”

  Doug jerked his head at the other men in the room. “Doug. Doug. Out. You too, Doug.”

  The priest’s eyes flicked, watching them troop across the background of the comms camera. He did not remark on the fact that they all looked exactly the same, and were all called Doug. But the Doug on the stretcher—Doug #2, to give him his official name—was sensitive about his genetic heritage. He preempted the reaction he expected by saying, “Yes, we’re clones. You wanna make something of it?”

  The priest swallowed visibly. A muted reaction, considering.

  “I’m guessing you’re from the New Holy Roman Empire,” Doug pressed.

  “The NHRE! Throw a stone in Rome and you’ll hit a spy.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “I’m a priest of the Society of Jesus. I work with some people you know nothing about, and it’ll stay that way.”

  “OK. So what’s this about?””

  “You’re injured,” the priest said. “What happened to you?”

  Doug saw no point in not telling him. The whole solar system was going to find out, anyway. “I just killed the president of this company. Got shot by one of his bodyguards.”

  “My God.”

  “Yeah. Now, if you’ve got some more bad news, I’d like to hear it.”

  “Why did you kill the president, if I may ask?”

  Doug shrugged, which sent a twinge through his bandaged torso. The answer was, he’d learnt that President Doug was the one who’d brought disaster to Mercury. Him and some mysterious person called Lorna, whoever that was, had unleashed the Heidegger program—the freaking Heidegger program—on this planet, so that President Doug could look like a hero for stopping it. Then a grateful solar system would have allowed him to declare independence. That had been the theory, anyway.

  Doug unconsciously sneered at the memory. Asshole had wanted a historic victory.

  And now Doug #2 had a historic catastrophe on his hands.

  He had taken the pr
iest’s call because he hoped the priest was calling from the New Holy Roman Empire. Doug was already talking to his own contacts in the NHRE, hoping to enlist their support at the UN when the blowback hit. He had thought this priest might be a back-channel diplomat. But the signal delay said he wasn’t on Earth. He was much closer.

  “I’m not telling you anything until you tell me why you want to know,” Doug said.

  “All right. Yoshikawa Spaceport. There’s a kind of bunker here. A rock-shielded facility, camouflaged by regolith. What’s in it?”

  “Where are you?” Doug said.

  “Will you answer the bloody question?”

  “If you can see that bunker, I’m guessing you’re in orbit. You’d better watch your back. Whoever whacked the Crash Test Dummy, they’re still out there.”

  The priest laughed. “That was us.”

  Tension drained from Doug’s body. Maybe the priest was a friend. But he remained wary enough to say, “And who are you, again?”

  “Never mind that. The point is, you owe us.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “So tell me about that camouflaged bunker at Yoshikawa Spaceport.”

  A ping flashed up in Doug’s HUD area. One of his EVA teams had just reported that the GESiemens consumer electronics factory looked to be only superficially damaged. It was still moving, crawling away from the oncoming terminator. ~Survivors? Doug subvocalized.

  “Doug,” said the priest. “I know you’re having a tough day. And I’ve no wish to make your life any harder. But I need this information. Perhaps this’ll convince you that I mean it.”

  All the holographic displays around Doug vanished. The bare walls of the situation room were exposed—for an instant. Then the lights went off. With a gentle whine, all the systems in the room powered down.

  In the silence, Doug heard the thunk-thunk of deadbolts shooting home, locking the pressure doors. The room suddenly felt cramped, airless.

  He heard his brothers whaling on the doors. The muffled thuds might as well have been klicks away. The situation room was nuke-proof, blast-proof. And it should have been hack-proof, too.

  “That IV line going into your arm,” the priest said quietly, “is delivering a low-dose cocktail of painkillers. Now look.” The dosometer display ticked up from 25 mcg/hour to 35. “It wouldn’t take very much more to kill you.”