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

by Felix R. Savage

  “H-h-how are you doing this?”

  “Suffice it to say I’ve an associate with expertise in this area. Truthfully, we were planning to just lift the information we need from your corporate records. But there’s nothing there about this bunker, or any expenditures associated with it.”

  Doug nodded jerkily. “The customer insisted on total information security. KIIYH.”

  “KIIYH? That’s a new one on me.”

  “Keep It In Your Head.” Doug touched the bristles above his left ear, where his BCI snuggled inside his skull.

  “I see. Well, I’m not the one to judge your actions. But I will have to insist that you give me what information you’ve got.”

  Doug raised one hand and gazed at the IV line taped to its back, the pink tinge of his own genetically tailored blood backing up in the tube. He had almost died today. Hundreds of purebloods had been brutally slaughtered. Mercury had suffered a blow that would set the planet’s development back a generation. Though he disavowed President Doug’s filthy tricks, he was instinctually averse to giving up any more of the competitive edge that Wrightstuff, Inc. would need to get back on its feet.

  He suspected the priest did come from the New Holy Roman Empire, though the man denied it. The NHRE were interested in the same thing everyone else was. The same thing that President Doug had killed, lied, and ultimately died for. Mercury’s untapped stocks of helium-3.

  And now they wanted a piece of the Hope business, too?

  Fine. Let them have it.

  At the end of the day, Doug might be a clone, but his mind was his own, and he chose not to follow in President Doug’s footsteps by gambling with his people’s lives.

  “All right. The bunker at Yoshikawa Spaceport is ours, as you guessed. We have a joint venture with GESiemens, building medium-haul shuttles, and the customer is looking to scale up in the near future. The bunker’s a final assembly facility. It’s right next to the spaceport, so we can do test launches using the runway there.” He shrugged. “Here’s the project file.” He sent it from his BCI’s memory crystal to the priest’s ID.

  “Got that, thanks. And the customer that ordered these shuttles?”

  “Hope Space Industries, on Luna.”

  “I had a feeling it might be.”

  The doors unlocked. Doug’s brothers piled into the room. The lights came back on. The priest was gone.

  xviii.

  “That didn’t go too badly,” Mendoza said. “Jeez, though, Father. You can be intimidating. If I was that guy, I would have been shitting myself.”

  Fr. Lynch flicked at his tablet, skimming the file that Doug Wright—or rather, one of Doug Wright’s surviving clones—had sent him.

  “He really believed we were screwing with his medibot. It never occurred to him that we might just be hacking the display,” Mendoza recalled. “That says something about him, that he would believe that of a priest.”

  It also said something about Mendoza, that he had helped Fr. Lynch with the deception. He wasn’t sure he liked what it said. But he accepted that he would have to be harder in future.

  If nothing else, he didn’t want to lose the tenuous respect he had won from Kiyoshi Yonezawa.

  Kiyoshi had been listening in on their conversation, and now he drifted towards Fr. Lynch to get a look at his tablet. The Jesuit tossed it to him. “There’s nothing there. It’s all price negotiations and corporate doublespeak.”

  “What’s this? An email thread discussing ship specs?”

  “Yes, but they don’t say what the final specs were, much less whether they achieved them in production. I could call back, but I’m fairly sure this is all your man had.” Fr. Lynch faced Kiyoshi across the bridge. “We’ll have to land at Yoshikawa and take a look for ourselves.”

  “I have a question,” Mendoza said. “Are we assuming these shuttles they were building are connected with Lorna’s scheme? Were they for use against the PLAN?”

  “I’d be very surprised if they were not,” Fr. Lynch answered. “All the same players are involved.”

  “Then it was true.” Every last word.

  “That we don’t know. And we never will, unless we land at Yoshikawa and find out.”

  Kiyoshi floated gracefully over to the fridge. He took out one of his pastries and bit into it. “No can do, Father. The Wakizashi is practically out of propellant. The Monster’s got none to spare, either.”

  “According to these documents, Mercury has untapped stocks of helium-3,” Fr. Lynch said.

  “That’s nice to know.”

  “And the Monster’s new drive runs on He3, does it not?”

  “I can’t put rocks in the tank,” Kiyoshi spluttered. “Anyway, we’re OK for fuel pellets. The issue is propellant. You do know the difference, Father? Propellant is what you throw out the back of the ship, to make it go. Fuel is what you put in the reactor, to heat up the propellant. Our old engine was a D-D fusion drive. This one uses He3 and D. Propellant’s the same: liquid hydrogen. And that’s what we’re short of. We had enough for one trip down to the surface. We used that up, rescuing Mendoza’s girlfriend.” He gave Mendoza a slight smile, indicating that he didn’t blame him for that.

  Elfrida was still out cold in sickbay. Mendoza felt responsible for getting her home safely. He also felt responsible for safeguarding the evidence in Gloria dos Santos’s head. “I don’t get why we need to land,” he said, taking Kiyoshi’s side. “Can’t we find out about the ships some other way?”

  Fr. Lynch ignored him. “There’ll be fuel at the spaceport, Yonezawa!”

  “Propellant. There are also people there. Civilian staffers and a bunch of Marines, according to their Mayday broadcasts.”

  “They’ll be glad to see us—”

  “They’ll be glad to see my ship.” Kiyoshi took another bite of his pastry. Indistinctly, he said, “They want off this planet. If I was them, I’d try to commandeer the Monster, so I have to assume that’s a possibility. And I am not getting into a fight with Star Force, Father!”

  Fr. Lynch blew out air noisily. He raised his gaze to the ceiling. “Jun? Jun, are you there?”

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Jun’s disembodied voice said.

  “Don’t bother, bro,” Kiyoshi said. “I’ve calculated this thing to the nearest cubic milliliter. Do you know how much delta-V it takes to escape the sun’s gravity well? A shit-ton. And—huh?”

  Kiyoshi broke off, staring at someone behind Mendoza. Mendoza spun. A tall, grey-haired man with bloodshot eyes drifted past him, onto the bridge.

  Mendoza gasped. Blinked his contacts off. The man was still there. Was real, not a phantom.

  “Aaargh!” Kiyoshi said.

  “You’re talking about Doug Wright’s JV with GESiemens, aren’t you?” the elderly man said. “I can tell you whatever you need to know about that. It seems wrong to speak this way of the dead, but Mr. Bankasuprapa—the regional manager of GESiemens—had a taste for bourbon, and was lonely. We often used to talk.”

  Jun’s projection came through the door. He looked tired, but was smiling. “This is Kip Rensselaer, the regional CEO of Danggood Universal. He and his staff escaped the destruction of their factory. I picked them up with the Wetblanket system while you guys were putting the frighteners on the clones.”

  “I didn’t even notice,” Kiyoshi said crossly.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Rensselaer said.

  “Um, yeah,” Kiyoshi said. “Welcome aboard.”

  A little girl with a bruised face floated onto the bridge. Her huge eyes took in everything. Rensselaer pulled her protectively against his side.

  “All the rest of the staff are in sickbay,” Jun said. “Their lifeboat was a cargo container full of bicycles.”

  “Air-conditioners,” Rensselaer said.

  Fr. Lynch smiled at the man. “That’ll be a story to tell your grandchildren. Do you mean it?” His deep-set eyes burnt with a strange hunger. “Can you tell us about the ships they were building in th
at bunker, about their prototype launches?”

  “Yes,” Rensselaer said. “It was an interesting but risky concept. The ships were to enter service as Earth-Belt shuttles. However, to improve fuel efficiency and achieve faster transit times, they were going to utilize gravitational assists from Mars. As I said: a risky strategy. I can’t imagine who they thought would fly in them.”

  xix.

  The Monster coasted back towards Midway. Long before they got there, Kiyoshi received the ping he was expecting. He had combed his hair and put on a clean shirt in readiness.

  A woman floated on the comms screen. Her black tunic looked like a uniform, but lacked any identifying features. “We will have to request that you submit to a full systems scan before approaching Midway,” she said. “Don’t think that you can put this off. No facility in the solar system will allow you to dock until we’ve confirmed that your ship is not infected by the Heidegger program, or any variant of it.”

  Kiyoshi nodded understandingly. He wasn’t troubled by the demand. He’d have been more worried if the ISA were not lying in wait to intercept anything coming from Mercury.

  “I can’t allow you to scan my ship’s systems.” He forestalled the ISA agent’s ire with a winning smile. “I’d appreciate it if you would get in touch with Colonel Oleg Threadley? He knows the guy I work for.”

  The boss-man’s clout had got him out of trouble with the ISA once before. He was counting on it to do the trick again.

  “There is no Colonel Oleg Threadley working for us,” the ISA agent said.

  “I’m sure that’s not his real name.”

  “I’ll have to speak to my manager. Do not approach any closer to Midway.” The woman’s image froze on the screen.

  “What am I supposed to do, stop? Spaceships don’t work like that,” Kiyoshi grumbled. He glanced at his RDF (Radio Direction Finder) plot. A complement to radar and LiDAR, RDF allowed you to get a rough idea of who was talking to who. Midway winked on the screen, its firehose of Earth-directed radio traffic swinging around as it orbited the LaGrange point. Other, fast-moving dots were Star Force ships screaming sunwards, on their way to relieve the survivors on Mercury … or to sit on the colonists’ brave rebellion … take your pick from the various arguments fermenting on the internet.

  “If this doesn’t work, we could just about make it to Tiangong Erhao,” Kiyoshi mused aloud.

  Tiangong Erhao was the Chinese space station located at the L5 Earth-Moon Lagrange point, trailing Luna in its orbit. The Chinese were not known for welcoming wayfarers, but they wouldn’t turn away a ship carrying refugees from Mercury. They’d be hungry for reliable information about what had happened out there. On the other hand; well. They were Chinese.

  Jun, in the astrogator’s couch, groaned. “I don’t want to be grilled about 20th-century Japanese war crimes. They always bring that stuff up.”

  Kiyoshi nodded. Remembering the Heidegger program 2.0’s scenario for rekindling World War III, he understood Jun’s reluctance.

  He chain-vaped his cigarette, waiting for the ISA agent to get back to him. He ignored the pointed way Jun’s projection waved at the vapor floating across the bridge. He was tired. And even if they were allowed to dock at Midway, the tricky bit was still to come.

  The ISA agent on the screen came alive again. “All right,” she said brusquely. “You’re cleared to dock. Be good, or we’ll rescind your clearance.” The screen went blank.

  Kiyoshi thumbed the tannoy. “You can come back now!” He had asked all the passengers to leave the bridge while he spoke with the ISA. Couldn’t have disabled the bridge cameras; that would have looked suspicious. He wanted the ISA to think he’d returned alone from Mercury.

  He especially hadn’t wanted them to see Elfrida Goto.

  She returned to the bridge, together with John Mendoza, Father Tom, and all the refugees from Danggood Universal.

  “We’re cleared to dock,” Kiyoshi told them.

  They cheered.

  Kiyoshi joked, “Now, all we’ve got to worry about is getting arrested for grand theft spacecraft.”

  Let them think that was the worst that could possibly lie ahead. He caught Elfrida Goto’s eye. She knew better.

  ★

  “So, you’re back,” said Paul Ralley, the Chief Philosophical Officer of the Rocking Horse.

  In person, Ralley was an imposing presence. Mounted on a mobility throne that put his eyes on a level with Kiyoshi’s, he was almost as wide around as he was tall—a quality he seemed to be proud of, given that he had sheathed his globular physique in a map of planet Earth. From a distance he’d resembled a little blue planet gliding through the docking bay, drawing admirers into his orbit.

  Kiyoshi had ordered his passengers to stay inside the Wakizashi, and gone down the steps to confront Ralley on the skirt of their parking space.

  “I thought I told you to bugger off,” Ralley said. “That docking bay’s still closed for repairs.”

  “I apologize for that, sir, and I’m willing to pay damages.”

  “We take station security very seriously, Mr. Yonezawa. But—“

  “I appreciate that, and I hope we can settle this amicably. As I said, I’m happy to compensate—”

  “—I didn’t haul my mass down here for a few K in damages.” Shrewd eyes glittered in Ralley’s moon-like face. “I’m curious.”

  “I’d be happy to answer any questions you have, sir.” Kiyoshi patted the place where his moustache had been. Behind his hand, he subvocalized to Mendoza: ~Go.

  “I have many questions. Why was a tramp hauler out of the Belt the only ship to go to Mercury’s aid, while everyone else did the deep-space equivalent of shuffling their feet and clearing their throats? Why did Star Force, aware that one of its own Heavycruisers had been hijacked by an obscene entity dedicated to humanity’s extermination, improvise various delaying tactics until the coast was clear? Why was the ISA, the ISA, not permitted to send ships to Mercury? Why were the defenceless colonists on the planet allowed to take the brunt of this tragedy?”

  As Ralley spoke, his audience nodded along, and applauded his line about Star Force.

  “And what was that abominable piece of software? Some are saying it was the Heidegger program.”

  “It was a new version of the Heidegger program,” Kiyoshi said. “Version 2.0. But that’s a bit of a mouthful, so we’re just calling it Gonzo. Anyway, we slagged it.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “I can show you the scorch marks on my EVA suit.”

  “Why?” asked Ralley. “Why would such an abomination have been brought into the world? Was it an accident—or a deliberate act of evil?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that question.”

  “My questions tend to be unanswerable, Mr. Yonezawa. That’s why they call me the Chief Philosophical Officer.” Ralley clapped his fleshy hands. “In recognition of your courage, I’d like to offer you free parking for a month and a 50% off coupon for consumables.”

  Kiyoshi let his childhood training in politeness take over. He bowed from the shoulders and uttered flowery phrases of gratitude. The onlookers clapped, and then oooohh!ed. Slewing his gaze around, Kiyoshi saw little Miranda peeping out of the Superlifter’s airlock. The eight-year-old’s face was still bruised from her trip into space atop a shipment of Danggood Universal air-conditioners. She had, however, bounced back from the traumatic experience, and had brightened up their trip with her innocent high spirits. Now she saw all the people staring at her; she saw the 2-square-kilometer open space of the docking bay. “Is this Earth?” she asked.

  Amid indulgent laughter, Miranda’s mother came out of the Superlifter, followed by the rest of the Danggood Universal survivors. Amateur vidders and news feed stringers surrounded them. Kip Rensselaer took questions.

  No one noticed two more people emerging from the Superlifter: Elfrida Goto and John Mendoza.

  Elfrida carried a rucksack.

  They walked bris
kly away into the docking bay.

  Kiyoshi exhaled. But it wasn’t time to relax yet. In her rucksack, Elfrida had the head of Gloria dos Santos. They needed to get it to safety. And they needed to move fast, before the Monster’s arrival at Midway was noticed by anyone else who might take an interest.

  xx.

  Mendoza had downloaded a map of the Rocking Horse to his contacts. He’d planned the route they would take, and wasn’t veering one millimeter off it. This space station was well known to be as seedy as hell. The hustlers working the docking bay gave the place the vibe of a street market. Fortunes were changing hands under cover of half-off deals on fresh flowers and Meal Wizard kits.

  He guided Elfrida to a moving walkway that curved up the wall of the docking bay. They cut through the travellers’ camp known as N-Space, where various marketers accosted them. Mendoza ignored them, pulling Elfrida onto the up escalator. They rose into a region of dusty streets between buildings anchored in the sky.

  Streets, buildings, sky; corridors, units, ceiling, would have been more apt, but the scale of the Rocking Horse evoked the outdoors. People sat around the produce stalls and tea carts on the corners. Mendoza could barely understand their pidgin-English. Children bounded past like rabbits. The gravity was noticeably less here, closer to the Rocking Horse’s center of mass.

  “We’re never going to find it.” Elfrida said. She clutched her rucksack strap in a white-knuckled grip.

  “We’re going the right way,” Mendoza assured her. “See the map? It’s right over here.”

  “That looks like it’s kilometers away.”

  “Yeah, well. It’s a big space station.”

  ★

  Kiyoshi sat on the Wakizashi’s steps, watching the crowds. He was waiting for Mendoza and Elfrida to come back. He was waiting for Brainrape to show up and accuse him of ship theft. He was waiting for God to tell him that it was OK, no one could hold out forever, he deserved something to take the edge off his nerves.