With this oddly momentous pronouncement, Dr. Hasselblatter leapt into his glider, broomstick over his shoulder.
“Sir! Sir …”
Dr. Hasselblatter’s head popped back out. “What?”
Elfrida wrung her hands. With only one contact in, she was off balance. “Sorry, sir. I was just wondering if you could tell me anything about the community … the local community on Mercury ……” Her briefing packet had been silent on this crucial aspect of her mission. “It doesn’t matter,” she apologized. “I’ll ask the locals.”
“The community? The community, Goto? There’s only one community on Mercury that should concern you. The UNVRP community. Especially the R&D division.” Dr. Hasselblatter winked mysteriously. “Worst. Bunch of. Plebs. Ever.” He ducked back into his glider and was gone.
★
“Vlajkovic.”
“What?” said Cydney, straining to reach a bunch of juicy caramels on a high branch.
Elfrida, five centimeters taller, grabbed at the branch. Leaves sprinkled their faces. “Mike Vlajkovic. Did you find out anything about him?” She had asked Cydney last night to research the name Dr. Hasselblatter had thrown out.
“Oh. Yeah, I totally forgot! Here.”
An email flew into the HUD area of Elfrida’s new contacts, peeping and fluttering on pearly wings. She had bought these contacts, out of necessity, at the UNLEOSS shopping mall. All they’d had was a novelty set themed on the kiddie brand of Unicorn Tears®. Now that more people were opting for retinal implants, with or without BCIs (Brain-Computer Interfaces), the market for contacts had shrunk to children, who were assumed to want unicorns and cherubs. (The other option had been Knights of the Milky Way™—for boys. Elfrida had wavered for ages.)
She opened the report on Mike Vlajkovic and skimmed the bullet points while Cydney gathered candy.
The gengineered trees of the pick-your-own orchard—a major UNLEOSS tourist attraction, despite the fact that you could find similar places on Earth—grew close together on the bank of the Angelou River. The air was sweet, hot, heavy. Down here on the equator, one full gravity obtained. Tourist families wandered through the taffy grass, carrying buckets of caramels, trufflefruit, toffee apples, sugarplums, marshmallow berries, and chocolate bananas.
Elfrida read that Mike Vlajkovic (38, married with two children) had lived all his life on Mercury. He worked for UNVRP’s human resources department. Lately, he had taken upon himself a role so archaic as to warrant an explanatory footnote: labor organizer.
“Uh oh,” Elfrida murmured, seeing the first adumbrations of trouble. Suckered again! she thought, not without a certain amount of admiration for Dr. Hasselblatter’s style. He had not pressured her to take this assignment. But she should’ve known that the director of the Space Corps would not meet with one of his roughly 6,000 employees in person unless there were more to it than a routine job transfer.
Mike Vlajkovic had gotten himself in the news by speaking out against the ramp-up of mining operations that UNVRP was supposed to be launching next year. Ponytailed, skull-faced, he raved about ‘anti-humanism’ and ‘AI boosterism’ in an embedded vid clip.
Elfrida’s lips twitched in the beginnings of a smile. “This is great stuff, Cyds. Thanks.”
“My team is the best,” Cydney replied. She bit into a toffee apple. “Oh. My. Dog. Yummo.”
So Elfrida was heading back into the land of ‘isms.’ On Earth, there was no such thing as ideology. It had died the gentle death of a bad-tempered but toothless dog. But out on the frontiers of civilization, people still got worked up about ideas and the choices they represented. And apparently, Mercury still qualified as a frontier.
Suddenly, Elfrida couldn’t wait to shake the candy-flavored dust of this faux-tropical paradise off her heels.
“Cyds?”
Cydney was wearing high-heeled sandals and a figure-hugging mesh tunic over a swimsuit. She had toffee smeared around her lips. “Yeah?”
Elfrida kissed her.
“What was that for?” Cydney squealed, obviously pleased.
“I think I made the right choice. You were so wise to tell me to take this job.”
★
Neither of them had ever travelled on a Starliner before.
“This is the life,” Elfrida acknowledged. She sank beneath the surface of the Olympic-sized scuba pool, which was framed by non-slip cliffs and stocked with tropical fish. She came up spitting and smiling, enjoying the way the water cradled her. For a moment she reflected on the irony that she could’ve gone swimming anytime when she was in Italy, but she hadn’t.
A slender woman in a burkini dashed out of the changing rooms, chasing a boy of four or five. Her costume hampered her. Shrieking in glee, the boy cannonballed into the deep end.
Elfrida flippered towards the boy. She stopped when another swimmer surfaced from the depths, bearing him aloft. The swimmer pulled off his scuba mask. It was Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter.
Elfrida swam away in a hurry. She found Cydney lurking behind a crag, vidding the family scene. “What’s he doing here?”
“You didn’t look at the passenger list?”
“I didn’t even know he had a family. Are they on vacation, or what?” Life on UNLEOSS was a permanent vacation. To go on vacation to Mercury would be kind of perverse.
“You could put it like that. And he’s not the only one. Look at the passenger list, Ellie.”
A winged unicorn presented it to her with a curtsey.
“I don’t get it.”
“You really don’t access my feed often, do you?”
★
Elfrida pored over the passenger list as she towelled off.
The ship was infested with minor celebrities. They included:
—Zazoë Heap, songstress and nose flute virtuoso, known for her outspoken support of euthanasia rights.
—Theodotus Cellini, flamboyant former mayor of the citystate of Las Vegas.
—Pyls O. Mani, a deputy vice president of the World Bank.
—Mork Rapp, famed environmentalist …
… and of course, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter and his family.
“What in the crap?” Elfrida concluded.
“Oh, Ellie,” Cydney said, affectionately tolerant of her cluelessness. “They’re candidates for the directorship. Or if they aren’t yet, they will be. They’re all rushing to Mercury to satisfy the residency requirement. I think it’s three weeks? Then the election’s a week after that. Snerk. Hurry, hurry, little slebs!”
“Et tu, Dr. Hasselblatter?” Elfrida muttered. After all his noble and politically uninvolved rhetoric.
Cydney was not interested in Dr. Hasselblatter. “Look, look here, this is the real dark horse.”
“Angelica Lin? Who’s she?”
They were out on the promenade that wrapped around the inside of the ship’s passenger module. Cydney directed Elfrida’s gaze to the passengers doing ultimate yoga in the zero-gee area in the central atrium. A woman with long black hair, bodacious in a strapless skinsuit, tucked her ankles behind her neck. “That’s her. She was Charles K. Pope’s girlfriend. Word is she’s running for the directorship, too.”
Elfrida sighed. The scent of hash browns drifted from the nearby apres-scuba restaurant, and her stomach growled. “I wonder if they do grilled cheese sandwiches,” she said, steering Cydney towards the restaurant. “There’s one big question mark hanging over this, isn’t there, Cyds?”
“What?”
“Where in all of this is Wrightstuff, Inc.?”
iv.
Wrightstuff, Inc. was the most powerful company on Mercury. It owned both of the planet’s polar zones, insofar as anyone owned anything in the context of the ongoing (three centuries and counting) debate about whether pieces of a planet other than Earth could be owned at all.
A second-tier company in terms of capitalization, Wrightstuff, Inc. had been the first to arrive on Mercury. Originally, it had laid claim to all of the planet. No one had b
othered to argue, except on principle, as long as Mercury remained inaccessibly remote in cost-benefit terms. The planet had a crust rich in iron and other ores, but you had to burn an insane amount of energy just to get there—never mind back again. However, the clean revolution had upended assumptions about what was cost-effective. In the first years of the 23rd century, cheaper spaceflight had dramatically lowered the cost of escaping the sun’s gravity well, and brought more competitors to Mercury.
In vain did Wrightstuff, Inc. protest to the Interplanetary Court of Justice. Bots on the ground, and the principle of fair competition, trumped paperwork of dubious legality. Wrightstuff, Inc. managed to hang onto the polar zones because it actually had people living there. The rest of the planet got carved up among the supermajors.
With Mars lost, the solar system had to look elsewhere for raw materials to satisfy humanity’s insatiable appetite for hardware.
And from the middle of the 23rd century, it looked to the planet nearest the sun.
Mercury had one important advantage over the asteroid belt: it offered multiple direct trajectories per year to every destination in the solar system. Wherever you were going, whatever you were hauling, odds were you could get it there from Mercury faster.
The swiftly orbiting little planet now exported not only commodities but products manufactured on the planet itself.
It was not too much of a stretch (for the PR types, anyway) to say that Mercury had become the factory of the solar system.
But even today, the best chunks of polar real estate lay unexploited in the possession of Wrightstuff, Inc. The company used them as collateral in fancy financial maneuvers. It also had a long-running partnership with the United Nations Venus Remediation Project.
★
“The name of the game is CSR,” said Lal Subramaniam, who had spent fifteen years in the job Elfrida was about to take over. “The terraforming of Venus! Humanity’s greatest endeavor since the Pyramids were built! A century-spanning project leveraging cross-disciplinary applied science and cutting-edge extraction technologies to transform a toxic hell into a new Eden for mankind! I’m quoting from Wrightstuff’s annual report, by the way. But the verbiage is simply a factual representation of our goals. What corporation wouldn’t want to be associated with such a salutary undertaking?”
“Uh, a lot of them?” Elfrida said. Subramaniam was sweating visibly. Lank black strands fell from his combover across the sunken pits of his eyesockets. His intensity worried her.
“That is correct. UNVRP was the hottest thing in the solar system when it first got off the ground. But the bloom has gone off the rose, no? It’s the strangest thing—the more we succeed, the more people criticize us, the more they line up to find fault with everything from our methods to the underlying assumptions of the Project.”
“I guess nothing fails like success,” Elfrida said.
“That’s profound,” Subramaniam said, opening his sunken eyes wide. “Very profound. I think there’s more to it than that, but that’s the problem in a nutshell.”
“It’s 4 Vesta,” Elfrida said. She still felt guilty about the fate of the second-largest asteroid in the Belt. “I’ve heard all kinds of variations on, hey, what gives UNVRP the right to use a protoplanet as a glorified wrecking ball … well, excuse me, it’s infested with PLAN malware; there’s nothing else to be done with it! But people have this, I don’t know, feeling that we shouldn’t be reconfiguring the solar system at will.”
“Yes,” said Subramaniam. “Indeed. But the acquisition of 4 Vesta only provided a focus point for an existing trend. Resistance to UNVRP has been building for at least twenty years. And so, to get back to the point, Wrightstuff, Inc. now regret the deal they did with UNVRP in the golden year of 2247. It no longer benefits their image to be associated with the Project. The humanitarian halo of UNVRP is no longer bright enough to offset their buccaneering investments elsewhere in the system. If they could, they would dissolve the relationship completely.”
“But they can’t, can they?”
“Fortunately, no. But they are creating obstacles to the Phase Five mining ramp.”
The two were walking, or rather trotting at Subramaniam’s rapid pace, around the promenade of the Starliner’s passenger module. The ship had slalomed into the sun’s gravity well, burning enough fuel to light Luna for a year, and settled into orbit 350 kilometers above the surface of Mercury. The trip had taken just six days, since Mercury was in one of its frequent close approaches to Earth.
Subramaniam popped out of his moustache-chewing trance to stare at the window of Gravitas Designs, one of the on-board boutiques, where a red-haired waif was being fitted with a custom set of stabilizer braces.
“Isn’t that …”
“Zazoë Heap,” Elfrida said. “We sat next to her at dinner last night. She’s the most boring person I’ve ever met.”
Subramaniam returned his attention to her. “Mike Vlajkovic is in the pay of Wrightstuff, Inc. I’m positive about that, although I haven’t been able to prove it. Maybe you can.
“The terms of our license give us the right to mine iron and aluminum—all the silicates, in fact—on their land. This we have been doing on a small scale for decades, to manufacture our own hardware.” Elfrida noticed Subramaniam’s use of we to refer to the Venus Project. It was a slip of the tongue she often committed herself. “They have never objected. It’s not as if there isn’t plenty to go around. But now that we propose to ramp up our mining operation, to implement Phase Five of the Project, they are seeking to impose all kinds of conditions, with the goal of shutting us down entirely. They are a dog in the manger! By the way, who owns this luxurious ship?”
“Wrightstuff, Inc.”
“Oh. Whoops.”
“Nah,” Elfrida said. “If they’re listening in, they need to hear this.” She raised her voice. “I’ve heard that Wrightstuff is an investment bank with a life support division.”
“Yes!” Subramaniam exclaimed, joining in the fun. “They want to claw back these extraction rights for use as collateral in their financial games!”
“Don’t they know that predatory lending is illegal?”
“They think they are above the law!”
“They think they are the law!”
A group of pensioners parted to go around them, discussing whether to spend their last afternoon on board at the rejuvenation spa or the Graceland Experience. Elfrida and Subramaniam grinned ruefully at each other.
“Well,” Subramaniam said, “that is how things stand. I hope you’ll be able to parry their dirty tricks better than I could. Frankly, I am very happy to accept early retirement.” His gaze wandered to a pompadoured geminoid robot that was bopping along the promenade, inviting people to the Graceland Experience. “I think I will go and have a look at my cabin now. Ensuite jacuzzi baths, did you say? You have no idea how nice that sounds after half a lifetime on Mercury. Farewell, Ms. Goto.”
He plunged off, leaving Elfrida to make her way down to the departure lounge. She felt oddly uplifted.
★
A modified spaceplane rendezvoused with the Starliner and took the passengers off. It powered into a highly elliptical polar orbit. Elfrida got her first look at Mercury through the virtual windshield at the front of the cabin.
The dayside of the small planet glowed steel gray, pocked and pitted, like a cannonball. A mesh of wrinkle ridges joined up craters as large as 1300 kilometers across. Oblique sunlight etched the rims of the craters like toothmarks. This was an airless, battered world—Luna without the large-scale topographical features: no light-colored outcroppings of feldspar rocks, no darker maria. Also, Elfrida reminded herself, Mercury had the greatest day/night temperature variation in the solar system. Right now, down there on the equator, it was about 450° Celsius. The temperature fell to minus 180°C during Mercury’s long nights. Sunrise to sunrise, one Mercurian day lasted for 176 Earth days… almost twice as long as the little planet took to orbit around the sun.
The spaceplane dived towards the surface. As if it were a car driving into the sunset, the ‘windshield’ lit up so brightly that everyone in the cabin shaded their eyes. This was a dramatic effect. They were just looking at a screen. If it were real, they wouldn’t have been able to gaze directly at the sun. Elfrida stared, captivated, at the huge orb with its thistle-fluff corona of superheated gas.
She planned to see this with her own eyes (suitably shielded) while she was here. “Sunrise on Mercury is one of the Seven Wonders of the Solar System,” she said aloud.
“What are the others?” Cydney said.
“Saturn’s rings. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The geysers of Enceladus. Olympus Mons—they haven’t taken it off the list, even though no human has visited Mars in more than a century.” Elfrida hesitated. “And Rheasilvia Mons, on 4 Vesta, formerly the highest mountain in the solar system.”
“Still is, right?”
“Only for another seventeen and a half years; then ka-plooey.”
“That makes two of the Seven Wonders the PLAN have taken away from us,” Cydney said. “What are they going to frag next? Wait a minute, you only mentioned five Wonders. Plus sunrise on Mercury makes six. What’s the other one?”
Elfrida grimaced. “Earth.”
The windshield went dark. The spaceplane was now diving down at a steep angle towards Mercury’s nightside. The north polar region filled the screen. Fuzzballs of light glowed in the darkness. Closer, each broke up into discrete pinpricks. These were the beacons of humanity, as inviting as windows on a cold and rainy night, welcoming the travellers to a world 77 million kilometers from Earth, which was nonetheless, because of these lights, a home from home.
The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3) Page 3
