“Murdered?” she said.
“Well, they aren’t saying it’s murder, but he drowned in freaking Lake Como. That does not happen. There are more rescue drones stationed around that lake than on the Riviera, OK? Anyway, how else would you explain the fact that they’ve locked down every city between Zurich and Athens?”
Elfrida looked at the static river of traffic that stretched out of sight beyond the Arch of Constantine. “I’m only half an hour from home. Maybe I should just leave my bike and walk.”
“Don’t do that,” Cydney said. “You haven’t yet adjusted to being back on Earth, have you?”
It was eerily silent on the Via Triumphalis, with everyone’s car stereos and televisions disabled by Mobility Control. Into that silence penetrated a thin warbling. Blue lights winked into sight around the skeletal curve of the Colosseum.
“Cyds, I gotta go,” Elfrida said. She cut the connection and sat astride her bike, nervously gripping the handlebars.
Three police striders bobbed around the Colosseum. They looked like prehistoric raptors with wraparound tinted eyes. They were designed to navigate nimbly through traffic, putting their feet down in the slivers of space between vehicles. People said that they were also designed to intimidate. The Italian bikers around Elfrida scowled, muttered “Cazzo la polizia,” and spat on the asphalt. The warbling sirens sounded like hunting cries. Drivers selected for random checks slid out of their vehicles and assumed the position in the shadow of the striders’ fuselages, while their bodies and cars were scanned. Of course, this was just theater. The police would be scanning everything in range.
Suddenly, one of the bikers near Elfrida gunned his machine. Engine howling, he roared off the street and zoomed along the sidewalk, away from the Colosseum, heading for the hillvilles. He shouldn’t have been able to do that. His bike was obviously jailbroken. Knowing that he’d be slapped with a massive fine when the police got to him, he’d decided to make a run for it. Everyone rubbernecked.
The bike’s taillight reached the nearest hillville, Città Collina San Gregorio, and started to climb the landscaped path to the top.
There was a sound like the pop of a wine cork. The bike veered off the path. It somersaulted downhill and landed against the swings in the playground. Its rider came to rest under the seesaw. He seemed to be bleeding pink from a glow-in-the-dark splotch on his back.
Elfrida knew what had happened. The polizia had sniped the biker with a paintball gun. He’d be pink for weeks, but otherwise fine. Just fine.
She cowered as a strider leapt over her, planting one foot with terrifying precision beside her rear wheel.
“Dumb pleb,” she mumbled. “Why would he think he would get away with that?”
Ten minutes later, the traffic started moving again. Elfrida’s inbox had filled up with emails from colleagues sharing the news of Charles K. Pope’s tragic death. She read and responded all the way home. No one mentioned murder. ‘Tragic windsurfing accident’ was the consensus. Elfrida’s supervisor, Jake Onwego, assured her that this would not affect her options. She still had a choice to make.
She parked off Piazza Benedetto Cairoli. As she was about to walk away, her Vespa sniggeringly informed her that she had had an unpaid parking ticket, and the polizia had hit her with an fine that was going to eat up half her furlough pay.
Tense with annoyance, she moved the bike into a legal parking place, and then walked back to her parents’ building.
Windowboxes of flowers and the odd ancient archway enlivened the quaint 20th-century street. A cat skittered across the wet pavement. The timelessness of the neighborhood comforted her—until a poll popped up in her path, randomly foisted on her by her network connection. “Hello! Jugglers, stiltwalkers, and other street performers should be taxed as a) artists, b) polluters, c) small business owners. Please pick one!”
Elfrida was tempted to reply, Frag off, but voting was compulsory. “C,” she snapped, and was informed that 53% of people so far had voted for b), polluters.
It would be just like this on Luna, except indoors.
She called Cydney on her way up the stairs.
“Hey, Cyds. I’ve decided: I’m going to take the Mercury job.”
“Yay!” Cydney shrieked. An animation of falling confetti surged across Elfrida’s contacts, obscuring her view of her father, who had opened the door at the top of the stairs. Her phone buzzed with applause.
Tomoki Goto caught her as she blundered into the door frame. “Did you just win something?”
“No, but I’m really hungry. Is there any of Mom’s sauerbraten left?”
Her father’s gaze tracked down. “What … is that?”
In her free hand, Elfrida was carrying the basket she’d been working on for the last three months. Louise 361AX had given it to her as a goodbye present.
“Oh,” Elfrida said, “just some junk my therapist had me do.” She sailed it into the living-room. Then she went after it and dramatically stuffed it into the recycling bin.
iii.
In the 23rd century, getting into orbit was easy and cheap. Elfrida’s flight departed from Erebus Spaceport. Delayed by a missed connection in Nairobi, she dashed to the gate, her Space Corps rucksack bumping against her back. Cydney was waiting for her, wearing a coat that resembled a cloud of cotton wool—very trendy—and carrying precisely nothing.
“Are you sure you really want to come?” were the first words out of Elfrida’s mouth.
Hurt colored Cydney’s heart-shaped, light brown face. She fiddled with a blonde ringlet. “If you don’t want me to come, I wish you would have said so last week.”
“It’s not that,” Elfrida said hurriedly. Their relationship had been rocky ever since they’d been back on Earth. Trying to smooth over the jagged moment, she said, “I meant, where’s your luggage?”
“Oh, I’ll go shopping on UNLEOSS.”
They shuffled towards the boarding gate. Cydney offered smiles to the other passengers who were covertly vidding her, having recognized her as someone micro-famous. Aboard the Airbus Hyperplane, they had another mini-fight over the stowage compartment above their seats: there was not enough room in it for Elfrida’s rucksack and Cydney’s cotton-wool coat, which was actually quite bulky.
“See,” Cydney said sweetly, “this is why I didn’t bring any luggage. I knew you’d be toting the kitchen sink.”
“I was ordered to max out my weight allowance with food coloring.”
“Food coloring?”
“Yeah, the stuff that makes spinach bars green, and organic sweet potato chips purple.”
“I don’t eat that junk,” Cydney said, trying to discreetly hide the spinach bar poking out of the pocket of her dress. “I know what food coloring is. Urrr. But why does UNVRP HQ want it?”
“Shrug. Maybe they’re tired of eating colorless nutriblocks.”
“Mercury isn’t one of your barely-functioning asteroid colonies. It’s a planet.”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t know that, Ellie?”
Elfrida had been being sarcastic, she just hadn’t said “Sarcasm” out loud. She had thought she and Cydney didn’t need to use emoticodes with each other anymore. She stared out of the porthole as the Hyperplane slid along the track to the entrance of the magnetically levitated launch tube.
Snowy wastes stretched to the horizon beneath slate-grey clouds. The overall warming of the planet had, for complicated reasons, made Antarctica colder. A few people did live along the coast. There were interspecies communities, made up of cetaceophiles who lived in wetsuits and whales who put up with them very nicely. There was also a prepper industry catering to wannabe emigrants to the asteroid belt, who could all too easily be convinced that they needed to fork out for survival training courses in Earth’s most unforgiving location.
Far from these communities, the spaceport sprawled down the flanks of Mt. Erebus in a slovenly, high-albedo jumble. Bots serviced private spaceplanes parked on sidings. Employees vaped cigarettes outside
loading bays.
“Earth,” Elfrida half-said, half-snarled.
“What about it?”
“This tired old planet.” I don’t belong here, she thought. Maybe I did once, but I’ve spent too long in space. This isn’t home anymore.
The Hyperplane entered the launch tube, cutting off the view. Cydney bundled her hair into a scrunchie, tucked her feet under her, and settled down to read something on a tablet that she held angled away from Elfrida. Now and again she made soft noises of interest.
Elfrida was just about to cave in to curiosity when Cydney looked up. “This is really interesting.”
“What is?”
“About Mercury. Their unique political situation. But I guess you know all this stuff already.”
Elfrida made a loose fist and pretended to take a swing at her. Cydney ducked, laughing.
“OK, you win, Cyds. I was so busy getting my paperwork done and getting my hyronalin prescription filled, etcetera, that I didn’t have time to do a whole lot of research. So, fill me in. Please.”
Cydney smiled. She loved being in a position to dispense information. “Well, I’ve been looking into this Charles K. Pope business. No one’s saying anything about that. They’re all like, ‘Charles who?’ But regardless of whether he was killed, or died in an accident, his passing is a big deal on Mercury. Basically, he was an absolute monarch out there.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Snerk. I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. The Venus Project has its headquarters on Mercury. That made Pope the ranking UN official in Inferior Space, the volume that includes the Near Earth Objects as well as Mercury and Venus, and—oooh, can I have a dragonfruit gelato?” She broke off to address the waiterbot navigating down the aisle.
“Coffee for me,” Elfrida said. “So he was the lay judge for Inferior Space. The most important person in the volume always gets it. So?”
“So, that makes the election of his replacement a big deal. They’re not just competing for the directorship of UNVRP, which, not to offend you, Ellie, but who would want it? They’re competing to become the most powerful person in Inferior Space.”
The tannoy instructed the passengers to fasten their seatbelts in preparation for weightlessness. Elfrida felt a little jolt of excitement, as if she were a child on her first trip into space. Unlike the bored business travellers around them, she would never get blasé about this.
Gripping her pouch of coffee in her teeth while she fastened her seatbelt, she said, “So, did you find out who’s getting the job … Wait a minute. You said election?”
Cydney grinned with purple teeth. “Yup. The director of UNVRP is elected! Everyone in Inferior Space gets to vote for them.”
“Are you serious? Democracy?”
“Yup.”
“That’s medieval.”
“I know, right?”
“What if people vote for some garbagehead that doesn’t know anything about the Venus Project, and doesn’t care?”
“Well, then, I guess they do. But Pope’s deputy is standing as a candidate. He’ll probably get it.”
“I hope so.” Elfrida drank her coffee. The informational display in her contacts informed her that the Hyperplane had now reached the tropopause. Gentle but perceptible acceleration pressed on her body. She snuggled her shoulders into her seat. “Why didn’t I know about this? I guess they don’t make a huge effort to publicize it. Voting. But why allow it in the first place?”
“Insert complicated historical reasons here,” Cydney said, rolling up her gelato pouch from the bottom. “Mercury’s pretty unique. The only colonized planet. I’ve always wanted to visit, actually.”
“Oh, you lie like a lying thing. Now I know why you wanted to come.” It was actually a relief to know that Cydney had an agenda. It put less pressure on their relationship. “You want to cover this election thing and get all the juicy gossip first-hand.”
“Am I that transparent?” Cydney pretended to be offended. “It certainly won’t hurt my access figures. But I wanted to come with you since way before this happened.”
“I know. I was just a bit concerned that you’ll be 77 million kilometers from all the parties and red-carpet events.”
“Laugh. Ellie, I have total confidence that with you around, something interesting will happen.”
The joke stung. It felt like a dig at Elfrida’s failure to prevent catastrophe on 4 Vesta, although Elfrida knew Cydney hadn’t meant it that way. “Dog, I hope not,” she said, forcing a smile.
The Hyperplane shot out of its launch tube. Outside the portholes, Earth dawned in its gauze-swathed majesty. Tourists bobbed up squealing against their seatbelts.
Cydney enabled the privacy screen around their two seats. She undid Elfrida’s seatbelt, and then her own. They kissed, weightless, oblivious to the awesome view.
Ping … ping … Elfrida reluctantly pulled away. “I’d better take this. Wow, hi, Lauren … Yes? Yes. Really? Well, of course, we’d be thrilled. Tell him thank you so much.”
“Who was that?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t expect that. It was my boss.”
“Onwego?”
“No, the boss. Dr. Hasselblatter, the director of the Space Corps. Actually, it was his secretary.”
“Is this good? Bad?”
“I’m not sure. He’s playing in a quidditch game tonight, and we’ve got complimentary tickets.”
★
The Space Corps was headquartered on the United Nations Low Earth Orbit Space Station (UNLEOSS). What with all the satellites and private spaceplanes dodging around in low earth orbit, the traffic up here was almost as bad as in Rome. They had to wait hours for an orbital transfer vehicle, and then another four hours in transit. But at last UNLEOSS loomed in Elfrida’s porthole. A giant sphere clamped between cylinders of stacked toruses, the space station floated half in sunlight, half in shadow. Rotating at speed, it looked bigger from here than Earth did.
Elfrida shivered with awe. She’d seen it many times before, but this incredible feat of space-based engineering never failed to move her.
“Someday, someone is going to get off their ass and invent teleporting,” Cydney groused as they queued to get off the orbital transfer vehicle.
“We’ll have to rewrite the laws of physics first,” Elfrida said.
But then again, she reflected later, a few hundred years ago, people probably thought you’d have to rewrite the laws of physics in order for human beings to fly.
Whatever the visions that inspired the early pioneers of space exploration, they could never have imagined a bunch of bureaucrats in capes and pointy hats flying around on jet-powered broomsticks, 800 kilometers above Earth, in pursuit of a winged cricket ball.
The lower-gravity regions at the ‘poles’ of UNLEOSS’s rotating sphere curved inward to the axis, where gravity was zero. Here at the ‘north pole,’ netting enclosed a playing field as large as a terrestrial soccer stadium. Elfrida’s complimentary tickets entitled her and Cydney to inner-circle seats, right up close to the action.
Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, director of the Space Corps and member of the President’s Advisory Council, zoomed past them on his broomstick, cape billowing.
“Go, Hasselblatter!” Elfrida shrieked. “Wizards! Wizards all the way!”
The Wizards (high-ranking Space Corps officials and the odd beefy secretary) were playing the Hardy Perennials (gardeners plus a few shifty-eyed ringers from the janitorial division). Contrails crisscrossed the playing field. The spectators directly across from Elfrida seemed to be suspended upside-down from an invisible ceiling. ‘Above’ them, roads and parkland receded into the dusk. The 3m-diameter axis of the habitat ran through the middle of the playing field, but this was a feature, not a bug: it was wrapped in magnetized astroturf on which several players, blatched, sat rubbing their knees.
The Hardy Perennials won, 230 points to 180.
“That freaking Chaser of theirs is not a gardener,” said Dr. Abdullah Ha
sselblatter, towelling his thick silver hair. “I happen to know that he won the All-Europe Janitorial Arts trophy for bin-throwing in 2284. Never been spotted near a flowerbed. And the league turns a blind eye.” He threw his towel into freefall. “Did you want something?”
Elfrida’s mouth opened and closed. She had made her way to the locker room on the assumption that Dr. Hasselblatter had given her the tickets because he wanted to see her, and this was the only time he could fit her into his schedule.
Dr. Hasselblatter laughed. “Just joking. Listen, Goto. These people are plebs. Mindless, self-centered, tech-obsessed bubble-dwellers. Petty empire-builders. They’d sell out their own mothers for the illusion, the illusion, mind you, of independence. But the Space Corps isn’t and will not be involved with any political shenanigans, do you understand? Our mission is to protect and support communities in space. Nothing will deter me from that. This agency exists to maximize human wellbeing and safety, without regard to anyone’s political agenda.”
Elfrida nodded vigorously. She had not the slightest idea what he was talking about. This was normal with Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, whose political skills were second to none.
“The human resources department at UNVRP HQ? Completely unfit for purpose. You’ll be effectively without local support.”
“Isn’t that how it always is, sir?”
“It is, Goto. Just warning you.”
Conversation in a dozen languages filled the changing room. Trainers sprayed their charges with cooling aerosols (temperatures in UNLEOSS were tropical, even after dark). A wandering globule of deodorant smacked Elfrida in the eye.
“Do you have any special instructions—” She regretted that word as soon as she said it, hearing a nuance of conspiracy, exactly what Dr. Hasselblatter claimed to hate. Her right eye streamed. She wiped it with the back of her hand. “Advice. I’d be really grateful for any advice you could give me, sir.”
Her right contact had come out. It was already out of reach. Mortified, she watched it float away.
“Advice? Oh, stay out of trouble. I know that might be difficult for you, Goto.” Dr. Hasselblatter laughed. Crooking a finger at her, he pushed off and exited the locker room, forcing players and groupies to dodge. Elfrida followed him out to the vertiginious emptiness of the parking lot ‘under’ the playing field. Dr. Hasselblatter’s private glider awaited. “That reminds me,” he said, one foot on the step. “Vlajkovic, that pleb. He might try to make trouble for you. In fact, he certainly will. But don’t take him too seriously. He’s on the wrong side of history.”
The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3) Page 2
