“Holy crap!”
“Yep. She got closer to Mars than any human being has in a hundred years. And then she went off the air.” Frank paused. “So, your job is to find the Dust,” he said, and walked away.
No, Mendoza thought. My job is to find her, isn’t it, Frank? Dead or alive.
The D.I.E. office had real plants everywhere, tanks full of fish instead of cubicle dividers, and ergonomic walls, for bouncing off—or banging your head on, if it was that kind of day.
Mendoza’s cubicle-mate, a guy named Youssef, volunteered more details about the final, failed Dust drop.
“It was in these auto-dispersal containers that would scatter it into the Martian atmosphere. From 1,000 kilometers up, which was Victoria McFate’s last known altitude, at least some of her Dust should have made it to the ground. But …” Youssef shook his large, spiky-haired head. “Most people around here think all the shuttles got fragged before they could deliver their payloads.”
“So we don’t actually have any data to analyze.” This was at odds with what Frank had told him.
“Vicky McFate was Frank’s fiancée.”
“I figured something like that.”
“He hasn’t accepted that she’s gone. So, that’s wishful thinking. We’ll be analyzing the data from the probes … when we find them.”
They sorted through the data from various radio receivers pointed at Mars, searching for anything that might be a signal from a lost nanoprobe. There were exabytes of data to analyze, from hundreds of instruments in Luna, Earth, and L2 Earth-Sun LaGrange point orbits, owned by the UN, the Chinese, and various private companies and consortia. Some of these the D.I.E. team had access to. Some they did not, yet, and this was where Mendoza’s expertise came in handy.
After a while, he almost felt like he was back at UNVRP, in the days when he’d loved his work.
But day after day, their search came up empty. Frank hung around the office, challenging people to tic-tac-toe and arm wrestling matches. He got in the way, but no one minded, because it was Frank. Mendoza learnt from Youssef that Frank had actually been going to pilot one of the delivery shuttles himself, but something had gone wrong, and he’d got left behind.
The revelation took Mendoza’s breath away. Trey Hope, the CEO of Hope Energy, had committed his only son to almost certain death. He must really believe in what they were doing.
Another of the shuttle pilots had been Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud, a nephew of Faisal ibn Abdul al-Saud II, whom everyone simply called the King. The House of Saud had gotten kicked out of the Arabian peninsula (and off Earth) 150 years ago, but the Saudi ex-royals continued to enjoy monarchical status on Luna. The King had poured millions into D.I.E. And now, having lost a nephew to it, he stood ready to contribute millions more.
If they could find the damn Dust.
“Oh no, we’re not under any pressure,” Youssef sighed.
Mendoza branched out into examining data from optical telescopes, reasoning that he might be able to see some debris from the shuttles in Mars orbit, if they had been fragged high enough up that it didn’t all fall down to the surface straight away.
What he found was shocking enough that he brought it straight to Jasmine Ah, the leader of the D.I.E. analysis section.
“These are ships!”
Jasmine took one look, nodded. “Yeah, we know about those.”
“We do?”
“The PLAN’s mustering a fleet in orbit.”
“No one told me.”
“Those that know have kept it in their heads. We don’t want another panic.”
Mendoza stared at this thin-armed spaceborn woman, whose charm bracelets rattled as she bounced up and down on her trampoline chair. He shook his head slowly. “I hope Star Force knows about this.”
“Sure they do. They’re keeping a close eye on the situation. Stay cool, Mendoza. We’ve got the PORMSnet, the Luna Defense Brigade—OK, so it’s just Frank and his buddies, but they’re quite good shots—and if all that fails, we’ve got thirty meters of rock above our heads.”
Jasmine assumed that he was concerned about their safety, here on Luna. But Mendoza had been thinking about Earth.
He returned to his workstation and searched for more information on the PLAN’s fleet. Now that he knew what he was looking for, the picture filled in rapidly.
The volume around Mars always teemed with the PLAN’s defenses, a thousands-strong swarm of orbital fortresses. But now, the number of objects in orbit around Mars was climbing daily, and all the new blips shared a familiar configuration. Cylindrical, belted with guns. They were the PLAN’s fighters, known as toilet rolls.
Mendoza also discovered that Jasmine hadn’t been kidding when she said the authorities were monitoring the situation. The Chinese had sent up a CTDF fleet to protect Tiangong Erhao. Star Force was recalling ships from Mercury.
Mendoza phoned Elfrida. “You know, this would be a great time of year for a holiday in the country,” he said. “How about you take a trip to northern Canada? Or the Urals.”
“Are you vaping something? The Urals are horrible at this time of year. Mosquitoes everywhere.”
Mendoza was thinking that if the PLAN attacked Earth, they would be quite likely to target Rome, for the same reasons that the forces of barbarism and darkness had targeted the Eternal City through the ages.
“Maybe North Dakota, then,” he said. “Or Wisconsin. One of those little countries.” Where there’s nothing worth nuking.
“How about New York? We were going to go to New York together. But then you got your new job, working for the helium-3 cartel.”
“Actually, a not-for-profit organization jointly funded by Hope Energy, the Korolev Foundation, and the House of Saud,” Mendoza said.
“Same difference.”
As they talked, Elfrida was walking through a street market in Rome, with her phone floating on its lanyard in front of her face. She stopped at a cheesemonger’s stall and ladled a mozzarella ball out of a vat of brine. Pushing her straw hat back on her head, she waited for her purchase to be weighed. Sparrows and pigeons flew over the stalls. September heat shimmered around people’s sandals.
“Ellie. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but a lot of smart people are worried. The PLAN is mustering a fleet. This isn’t just a nine-pack, it’s like a nine-hundred-pack. They might be targeting Earth.”
“Yeah, right. Every two years, the supposedly smart people say this same stuff.”
“But this time is different.”
“I’m not worried,” Elfrida said, and paid for her mozzarella.
The signal delay, 1.5 seconds, was just long enough to make the conversation feel unreal. Mendoza, frustrated, hit disconnect. As the screen went dark, Elfrida’s voice floated out, from 1.5 seconds ago: “I miss you, that’s all.”
“I miss you, too,” Mendoza whispered to his empty apartment.
He had signed a non-disclosure agreement. He wasn’t allowed to mention D.I.E. to outsiders. So he had not been able to tell Elfrida why he (and a lot of people smarter than him) believed this time was different.
Because of D.I.E. itself.
The PLAN seemed to be changing its modus operandi at the very same time that a few brave humans had poked it.
Coincidence?
Not freaking likely.
Their anxiety seeped out to the population of Hopetown. One day a group of protesters besieged the Hope Energy campus with holographic projectors that enclosed the campus in lurid footage of PLAN attacks. “SCIENCE KILLS!” they shouted. “STOP THE MADNESS!”
“Science kills,” Frank Hope IV said, staring out of the window in the analysis section. “That’s a good one. Without science, they’d be sucking vacuum right now.”
“We’ll have to do something,” Jasmine Ah said. “We can’t just hunker down. They’ll go to the media.”
“The PR department’s on it.”
In the air above the lawn, a toilet roll swooped towards an asteroid, vomiti
ng hot plasma from one end and projectiles from the other. The asteroid exploded.
“That’s fake,” Youssef said. “No one ever got footage that good.”
But Mendoza could feel the impact that the graphic images of destruction were having on his colleagues. And on himself. He tasted fear, like biting on an antique coin.
Frank set his jaw. “I want to show these guys what they’re protesting against. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, come with.” He looked at Mendoza.
Down on the lawn, a handful of young men sat crosslegged, operating their projector. They were the type of young men who wore jeans under their dishdashas, and probably got their news from chitchat on gaming forums.
“Science kills!” said the beardiest one.
“Salaam aleikum to you, too.”
“Oh shit, you’re Frank Hope.”
Mushroom clouds seethed silently overhead. Now Mendoza knew the footage was fake, because he had seen nukes go off in vacuum. They just made bright flashes.
“Guess you guys are into gaming?” Frank said. “That looks like a scene from Existential Threat VII.”
“Uh. How did you know?”
Frank touched his left eye. “Zoom functionality. You forgot to remove the watermarks. Anyway, I’d like to show you a sim we put together here, kind of a demo. We can do it right now, if you brought your immersion kits. If you’re not interested, fine, but in that case, I’ll have to have security escort you off the campus.”
The young men conferred. Suddenly, they all jumped.
“What?” Mendoza blurted.
“Text message from the King,” said the beardiest one. “He says do it.”
The protesters unpacked their immersion kits. Guys like this always had pricey gear, and they toted it everywhere. They put on their masks, headsets, and gloves and lay down, like corpses in white body bags (and a few black ones—there were some girls among them), scattered across the bristly gengineered grass.
Frank had immersion kits brought out for Mendoza and the other newbies who’d followed him downstairs. Mendoza found a place to lie flat. Newly mown stems prickled his back through his shirt and waistcoat. The protesters had turned off their holographs, so that sunlight bathed the campus once again. You could only tell it was fake because it was not warm.
He settled his mask over his face, aligned the breathing holes under his nostrils, logged in—
--and opened his eyes in a dim auditorium.
The protesters stood in front of the stage. Their avatars came straight out of Existential Threat VII or Grimdark Tales—cyborgged out with augments, or sporting elf ears and animé hair.
Frank stood alone on the bare stage. His avatar looked just like his real self, except that it was wearing a Lunar Defense Brigade uniform. He said, “One of our subsidiaries, Hope Space Industries, has developed a revolutionary new class of spaceship. It’s got a four-tiered thermal cooling system that utilizes water/glycol, ammonia, sodium, and macguffinite, a new material developed right here in Hopetown by our materials scientists. Macguffinite has a specific heat capacity per kilo of eleven thousand joules per kilogram kelvin! Its phase change from solid to gas sucks up enough energy to mask the heat emissions of a VASIMR drive. Yeah, I know ion propulsion is out of fashion these days, but it ain’t slow, and you get a high specific impulse for maneuvering. While invisible.” Frank spread his arms. “People, this is as close as we’re ever gonna get to matching the PLAN’s stealth technology.”
No, it isn’t, Mendoza thought. He felt a pang of pity. If only Frank knew that someone else had surpassed this achievement already. Far from being revolutionary, the thermal cooling system Frank described was just a better version of existing technology. In comparison, somewhere out there was a 100-year-old Longvoyager that could magically vanish.
But there was no point mentioning the Yonezawa brothers or their Ghost, since Mendoza had no idea how the Ghost worked, much less where the Monster was now. Anyway, Jun and Kiyoshi wouldn’t thank him for blowing their cover.
Frank answered a few questions about the new heat-shielding technology. Then he cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to present to you … the Fragger stealth fighter!”
The auditorium suddenly doubled in size. On a low pedestal, rotating beneath strobe lights, stood …
One of the Dust delivery shuttles, which Mendoza had seen plenty of pictures of before.
The erstwhile protesters crowded around the ship, seduced by its streamlined silhouette. “Kickin’ railguns,” breathed a girl.
Those railguns had not been in the pictures Mendoza saw. Nor had the clusters of nukelets slung beneath the shuttle’s wings.
The pieces suddenly fell into place.
“I get it. The Fragger isn’t actually a shuttle at all,” Mendoza texted Frank. “The so-called shuttles were designed as fighter-bombers from the start.”
“You got it,” Frank texted him back. He switched to subvocalizing for everyone to hear. “Another interesting thing about the Fragger is that its hub is dumb. Supercomputers run hot. They make stealth that much harder.”
Unless you’re an ASI, Mendoza thought.
“For that reason and others, we’ve taken the opposite tack from Star Force. They’ve been building smarter and smarter ships. The newest generation of Gravesfighters can do everything except kiss you goodnight. The pilot is only there to take responsibility in a court of law when the ship screws up.” Laughter. “Well, we’ve moved away from that. These ships put the pilot back in charge. What I’m saying is, to fly a Fragger, you’ve got to really be a pilot.” Frank waited a beat. “So, anyone want to take her for a spin?”
There were no takers at first. Then a few. Then a dozen. Since this was a sim, as many could participate as wanted to. Mendoza tagged after the gamers as they climbed up onto the Fragger’s wing and into the cockpit, one by one, like clowns getting out of a car in reverse.
Reaching the cockpit, he was alone again, in his own iteration of the Fragger sim. Levers, dials, and screens encrusted the interior of an egg-shaped cavity barely large enough for his flight couch. He had no idea what was what, so he touched nothing. He looked down at himself. He wore an EVA suit, and could feel the lump of a recycling tube between his buttocks. Fragger pilots would not be flying in comfort. But that was on purpose, wasn’t it? Feel like you’re sacrificing something. Feel like you’re risking everything. Because you are.
“Here we go,” Frank’s voice echoed out of nowhere.
Mendoza’s heads-up screen lit up with an optical feed. Mars floated in the center of the screen, a russet ellipse etched with high-resolution megastructures.
Mendoza leaned forward, fascinated. This image must be based on the data from the nanoprobes. It was not someone’s best guess. It was not a clip from an immersion game. It was the most accurate map of Mars in existence.
And another piece fell into place.
The whole purpose of the Dust surveys was to gather data for pilot training.
A stream of black flecks drifted across the Elysium Planitia.
“Your mission,” intoned Frank, “should you choose to accept it …” He broke off to chuckle. “That line always cracks me up. Sorry. Your mission is to penetrate the PLAN’s orbital defenses. Go in low and hard. Your primary target is the Big Turd, where we suspect that the PLAN has its main computing assets in an underground data center powered by geothermal electricity. Secondary targets are the other surface facilities you can see on this map. However … HEADS UP!”
Mendoza flinched at Frank’s sudden shout. A black shape blurred across the optical feed. Then his screens flashed white and went off. The cockpit darkened to a womb-like gloom.
“You got slagged,” Frank said to him.
Mendoza rubbed his mouth in irritation (his hand went straight through the imaginary helmet that he wore). “That’s some kick-ass stealth technology. Just saying.”
“Don’t forget, masking your heat emissions is different fro
m hiding your radar profile. Of course, the Fragger uses every known deflection and absorption technique, so it shows up on radar as something much smaller than a ship. A chunk of rock, maybe. But the PLAN has toilet rolls patrolling this volume all the time, specifically to zap anything that moves. Even chunks of rock. So, you got unlucky.”
“Unlucky, hell. You did that on purpose to give the wannabes a taste of combat.”
“What fun is a sim without space battles?”
“I’ve never been big on sims. Or space battles. Did any of our gang survive that?”
“Five guys slagged the toilet roll before it could get them. Three of those survived the next attack, too. They’re now approaching the outer ring of orbital fortresses. In real life, that’s the tricky bit. Those fortresses are the size of asteroids. Maneuvering through a debris field that’s moving at orbital velocity … it’s not a game for pikers. But Vicky managed it. Abdul and Erik did too, we believe.”
Wishful thinking, Mendoza decided. “Can I see?”
“You’re supposed to be dead. Oh, fine. Here you go.”
Suddenly, he seemed to be floating in space, as if he had survived the destruction of his fighter. He was now much closer to Mars. It filled the sky. Gigantic rocks glided between him and the Red Planet, sidelit by the sun.
“Those are the PLAN’s orbital fortresses,” Frank said. “Megawatt laser cannons emplaced on each one.”
“Where’d all those rocks come from, anyway?”
“Mars used to have two moons.”
They heard a distant screech. “Allahu akbar!”
“Sounds like someone’s having fun,” Mendoza said.
“They have a long cultural tradition of this kind of thing,” Frank said.
“Suicide bombing?”
“Let’s call it berserking. Scandinavians, too. The Irish. All the Celtic peoples. My family comes from the old United States. A nation of latte-sipping bleeding hearts. It took a long time on Luna before we learned to unleash the crazy.”
“So maybe there’s hope for me.”
“Ha, ha. Yeah. I think so. It’s nothing to do with ethnic heritage, really. When we start recruiting pilots, we’ll be looking for people who don’t care if they live or die … who are ready to sacrifice everything to save humanity.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 121
