The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3)

by Felix R. Savage

  The children giggled. Elfrida lost control and cartwheeled diagonally across the slope. She crashed into a small crater, and Boris laughed out loud.

  She made much of her ruffled dignity, rubbing non-existent bruises “What are you looking forward to, then?” she asked.

  “Getting real jobs,” Lena said.

  “Oh yeah? What do you want to be?”

  “I want to be a waitress. I’ll have a uniform with a nametag, and we’ll have tables, and all the tourists will come to eat at my restaurant! We’ll serve spinach and broccoli.”

  “Yum yum,” Boris said. “I’m going to eat allll the broccoli!”

  This was childhood in space, Elfrida thought. Romping over Mercury in three-million-spider suits, while yearning to sit at a table and eat vegetables.

  What these kids wanted most of all—what Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign implicitly promised them—was normality.

  “Jake! Over there!” Boris said.

  There was a moment of oddly tense silence.

  “I definitely saw something,” Boris said.

  Jake slowed down and ran back the way they’d come. They all followed. Their headlamps picked out nothing unusual that Elfrida could see. Gray rock, blancmanged by micro-impacts. This particular area had never been strip-mined. Judging by the undisturbed dust, it had never even been traversed by humans, or robots, before.

  “There,” Boris said.

  “Good eyes,” Jake said. His drill-fanged head turned towards Elfrida, an automatic human gesture that Elfrida interpreted as uncertainty. “I’ll be back in a minute, ma’am.”

  “What’s he doing?” Elfrida said, watching him spider away.

  “Just checking out the rocks,” Boris said.

  “What did you see?”

  Neither Boris nor Lena answered. Jake’s phavatar came back, middle legs refastening the edges of his cargo net. “OK, let’s go.”

  After a few minutes of running in silence, Boris could not contain himself. “Was there anything, Jake?”

  “We haven’t tested it yet,” Jake snapped.

  “Oh, kids,” Elfrida said. “Stop being so mysterious. What’d you find? Palladium? Diamonds?”

  Lena said, “Laughing myself sick! There aren’t any platinum-group metals on Mercury. As for diamonds? Who’d bother to pick those up? They’re cheaper than water.”

  This was true. The abundance in the asteroid belt of diamonds, and for that matter platinum-group metals, had set a low floor under the market. The hard-currency action was now in the rarest of rare earths and other elements such as helium-3, which were not to be found on Mercury, either.

  “What is it, then?” Elfrida said. She folded her arms, which were her front legs, and crashed onto her chin. “Ow!”

  “I thought you were a professional, ma’am,” Boris giggled.

  Elfrida did not play up her klutziness this time. She sought a severe tone. “Kids, I’m not going to let this go. If you’re doing anything that might hurt Dr. H.’s campaign ...”

  “It’s not wrong, and our parents know about it!” Boris said.

  “Fine. See for yourself.” Jake stopped. He rooted in his cargo net and took out a small demron sack, which he tossed to Elfrida. It was heavy. “Your suit has spectrographic imaging functionality. Turn it on. You’ll have to open the sack. It’s scan-proof.”

  Elfrida quizzed her phavatar’s MI assistant. ~Spectrographic imaging functionality?

  ~Enabling now, the mechanical intelligence answered.

  Her field of vision turned into a mosaic of false color. Her companions were webs of aquamarine fleximinium. The landscape remained uniform, albeit now green. ~Calcium, magnesium, aluminum, the MI identified the variegations in the rocks. ~There is very little iron here. It is concentrated in the regions of ancient lava flows.

  Elfrida opened the sample sack.

  The rocks inside sparkled with golden flecks.

  ~Helium-3, the MI said.

  ~SUIT COMMAND: Cancel spectrographic imaging view.

  “I thought there wasn’t any He3 on Mercury,” she said to the children.

  “There isn’t much,” Jake said. “It’s deposited by the solar wind, and we’ve got a magnetosphere that keeps it out. But the magnetosphere is leaky. When magnetic fields carried by the solar wind link up with ours, they create magnetic tornadoes. And you know how tornadoes work, right? They’re flux tubes that allow the solar wind to reach the surface. They can be stable for ages. Long enough for deposits of He3 to build up on the surface. So, we’re always on the lookout for those.”

  “About how much would be in a deposit like this?”

  “Maybe 250 grams.”

  Elfrida relaxed. It wasn’t much. Luna produced 50 kilograms annually of the rare element used system-wide in nuclear fusion drives and reactors.

  “But lunar production is slowing,” Boris added. “They’ve completely strip-mined the equator. You can’t even see the man in the moon anymore! So the price is going up.”

  “So,” Jake said, “we’ve flagged that deposit, and we’re sending a blasting bot and our No. 2 dragline excavator to pick it up.”

  “And how do you get it off-planet?”

  Jake waved his phavatar’s middle legs in a shrug. “You’d have to ask Dad.”

  “I will,” Elfrida said grimly.

  Now I know why he wants to take over the hab … and the mining operation. He’s got no intention of mining iron for the Phase Five Ramp. He wants the He3.

  “Don’t any of the majors know about these He3 deposits?” she asked.

  “Well, I guess they do,” Jake said. “They pick the stuff up and sell it just like we do. I guess.”

  He sounded uncertain. Boris said darkly, “My mom says it’s a cartel.”

  He clearly did not know what a cartel was. But Elfrida could guess what his mom’s theory was.

  Luna’s near-monopoly on helium-3 (the only other known deposits were on asteroids, and were relatively tiny) gave its producers political as well as economic power. And those producers were by and large the same resource companies that operated on Mercury. They were probably passing off any He3 mined on Mercury as Lunar product, both to keep prices up and to avoid an unseemly scramble for Mercurian real estate.

  Elfrida had been researching Mercury’s sovereignty issues. There was no formal agreement on who should, could, or did own the planet. Whereas Luna had long ago declared independence as a state within the UN, with political mastery falling to the early birds in Shackleton City, Wrightstuff, Inc.’s attempt to pull off the same trick on Mercury had flopped. A bunch of other companies had moved in and set up their own mining operations, with Wrightstuff, Inc. powerless to stop them. Nowadays, harmony rested on the division of the planet into mining territories—a demarcation that had no more legal basis than a gentlemen’s agreement.

  Should the existence of helium-3 on Mercury be made public, the status quo could collapse in the blink of an eye. Small-fry pirates would descend from all over the system. It would be chaos.

  “Don’t worry,” Elfrida said to the children. “My lips are zipped.”

  “Are we there yet?” Lena whined.

  “Nope,” Jake said. “Why don’t you two log out for a while, let your assistants take over? It’s silly for us all to be here.”

  After running for a couple more hours, they reached the top of one of Mercury’s lobate scarps: vertical precipices heaved up by the primordial process of cooling and shrinking. This one was named the Rowling Scarp. In the blackness 2km below, blue flames flared, their tops snapping off and dancing independently.

  ~Try infrared, Elfrida’s MI assistant advised.

  ~Wow!

  The suit’s infrared vision revealed a mobile mine that made the UNVRP operation look like a hobby kit. Machines the size of spaceships trudged along the foot of the scarp, sucking up blast debris and feeding it into a vacuum smelter—the source of the unearthly flames.

  “We’ve got a smelter, too,” Boris said. �
��But it’s not as big as that.”

  “What’s that over there? It looks like a factory.”

  “It is one. It makes refrigerators.”

  “No,” Lena said. “Toasters.”

  “It makes everything,” Jake said.

  Elfrida’s assistant informed her that this was the industrial facility operated by Danggood Universal, one of the smaller players on Mercury. In an era when 3D printers could fabricate human organs, never mind consumer durables, high material prices on Earth meant that it was still cheaper to print these things (refrigerators and toasters, not human organs) on Mercury, put them in boxes, and send them winging back to Earth. Red tape and changing mores had killed manufacturing on humanity’s home planet. Heavy industry was now seen as a form of public defecation, raising the cost of regulatory compliance to the point that it made more sense to operate on Mercury.

  “They shoot the stuff into orbit from here,” Jake said. “We might see a launch if we hang around long enough. Then when the sun rises, it powers up the solar sails, and wheeee! As you might say, ma’am.”

  “Y’know, on Earth,” Elfrida said, “people sometimes wonder why stuff they ordered takes so long to arrive. Now I know. It’s because someone miscalculated the launch trajectory from Mercury.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m just kidding. They do final assembly on Earth. You can order whatever and it arrives the same day.”

  “Really?” the children repeated, longingly. Elfrida felt bad for making them envious.

  But it was time to go to work. Jake took a length of slithery fabric out of his cargo net. Each holding a corner, they unfolded it over the edge of the scarp. They splarted down the top corners. Boris and Lena then leaned over the edge to shoot more splart at the bottom corners, sticking the banner to the rock.

  They shone their phavatars’ headlamps down at their handiwork.

  The banner read: VOTE FOR ABDULLAH HASSELBLATTER! MOAR ART.

  “I hope this works,” Elfrida said.

  “It’ll work,” Jake said.

  “I’m just wondering if this is really the best way to use our resources.”

  “Why, what would you have done, ma’am?”

  “Oh, probably slapped together a sim and used profile-crawling software to offer it to likely voters.”

  “You’re so old-school!” Lena jeered. “You have to get physical with these people. It’s the only way to make them notice you.”

  “I just wonder if anyone’s actually going to see these,” Elfrida pondered, as they jogged along the scarp to hang another banner ahead of the Danggood Universal operation.

  “It doesn’t matter if anyone sees them,” Jake said. “I mean, of course they will. Their sats can see us right now. But the point is that we went to all this trouble, so they know how much we care.”

  By the time they finished splarting up their banners, satellite images had already flashed around the solar system. The images, at first transient morsels of LMAO-fodder, gained millions of views when they were joined by more images of a kerfluffle between Elfrida’s crew and another gang of phavatars who were splarting up their own banners on the same scarp. Despite Elfrida’s reservations about the tactic, it had already been copied by one of Dr. Hasselblatter’s rivals.

  xiii.

  At that very moment, in Danggood Universal’s all-terrain mobile white goods fab, the company’s regional CEO, Kip Rensselaer, was looking out the kitchen window. The window was actually a viewport screen, and the panorama upon it would have been invisible to the naked eye. Danggood Universal operated further ahead of the terminator than UNVRP did, proceeding in darkness around its band of territory between 65° and 72° N. In this simulated view, the banners stood out like wounds on the cliff.

  “Flattering,” Rensselaer said. “Do they know this operation has a human staff of four point five?”

  “I don’t think you’re the intended audience,” said his visitor. “It’s the NEO colonists they’re targeting.”

  “Oh. Thanks for destroying my momentary illusions of importance.”

  “Sorry.” There was a pause. “Point five?”

  “What? Oh. My mineralogist’s seven-year-old daughter.”

  “I hope you’ll allow her to make up her own mind about who to vote for,” Dr. Ulysses Seth said, archly.

  “She’s already joined the Hasselblatter fan club,” said Rensselaer. “They get capes and wizard hats to stick on their internet profiles.”

  Visibly depressed, he opened the drinks cabinet and poured himself a bourbon.

  Dr. Seth watched him thoughtfully. The two men were old acquaintances. They had both spent their lives on Mercury, which bound them together in a small and exclusive brotherhood. This planet grew on you. Unlike an asteroid, Mercury had gravity, literally and figuratively. Dr. Seth had come to cherish its sere, radiation-scalded expanses. For that reason (and others), he had travelled here in person, rather than arranging a teleconference. His personal Flyingsaucer was parked on the stem of the cargo launcher that undulated behind the fab like a Slinky draped with a tablecloth.

  As they sat without speaking, a shooting star lit up the viewport screen. A container had just launched, packed with 100,000 air-conditioners.

  “So who are you voting for?” Dr. Seth said.

  “Not you,” Rensselaer said.

  “And I came all this way to press your withered flesh and promise you sweeties.”

  “A wasted guilt trip,” Rensselaer said. Dr. Seth grimaced at the pun. “We’re voting for Pyls O. Mani. When a man takes the trouble to change his name to a homonym for mucho moolah, you can be reasonably confident that his soul contains … well, no depths whatsoever. That’s what we’re scared of, you see. The depths of people’s souls. This planet turns people into poets. Strivers. Utopians. They cease to see the rocks for the horizon. Just look at Doug.”

  “He’s still backing Patel.”

  “He hopes to win the affection of the NEO colonists, who collectively owe him UNS1.1 billion. While they are joining the Hasselblatter circus in droves.”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you, Seth? You’ve been buzzing in our ears for decades about founding a Republic of Mercury. I’ve told you, we’ve all told you over and over again, that kind of thing went out with fossil fuels. Even if we were prepared to rebel—yes, I say rebel—our independence would last precisely as long as it took the news to reach Earth. Star Force keeps a couple of ships in orbit around Mercury at all times. What’s up there right now? The Crash Test Dummy and the Dead Weather. Either of them could wipe out all our assets in less time than it has taken me to drink this bourbon. You could not hold a motley coalition of regional plutocrats and field managers together in the face of such overwhelming odds.”

  “George Washington did.”

  “That’s the sort of thing I expect to hear from Doug, not you. Also, you’re not George Washington.”

  “Nor ever like to be. I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

  “When a man starts to quote Eliot,” Rensselaer said, “it’s time to open another bottle.” He did so.

  Dr. Seth hobbled restlessly around the kitchen. It was circular, banded in part by the viewport screen, with fish tanks running the rest of the way around. A short hop, for the fish, from tank to chopping board. Rensselaer and his staff killed the fish that they ate themselves, rather than getting a bot to do it. Space-dwellers, if they were psychologically healthy, came to relish dirt, grime, fish scales, even blood. It was a natural human reaction to confinement in tunnels and radiation-shielded boxes. Sociologists saw this craving for pastoral squalor as a sign that a colony was reaching its psychological limits. They did not believe that humans could live in space any longer than three generations. But Dr. Seth believed differently. While he acknowledged that the UNVRP R&D division had gone off the rails, he saw this as something to celebrate.

  Under the most unnatural conditions, huma
n nature asserted itself.

  He interpreted Rensselaer’s despair as an implicit homage to this same miracle.

  As a man with more than half a brain, Rensselaer was all too aware that humanity was collapsing into a defensive crouch, oppressed by the seemingly undefeatable PLAN.

  Rensselaer believed they could not do anything about it.

  But Dr. Seth did.

  He halted in front of the viewport screen. “I suppose you saw the news yesterday?”

  “Yes. Earth’s PORMSnet intercepted another meteorite. Quite a large one. The explosion was visible in daylight from South America.”

  “Isn’t it odd? In past centuries, destructive meteor strikes were rare enough to go down in history. Now, they come at the rate of several a week.”

  “Oh, stop being so arch,” Rensselaer said. His voice was foggy from the bourbon. “You and I know perfectly well that those meteors do not wander into Earth-crossing orbits by chance. They are kinetic kill vehicles launched from Mars. Earth’s defense establishment lives in terror of the day when the PLAN throws something really big at us … something we could not blow up, or divert in time … something like 4 Vesta.”

  “We foiled that scheme. If that was their scheme.”

  “Yet the so-called Heidegger program lives on in 4 Vesta’s abandoned infrastructure. I can’t understand why we haven’t fragged it,” Rensselaer said.

  “I can. It must be studied, its weak points found. Some think that the meteors aimed at Earth aren’t intended as kill vehicles pure and simple, but that they carry something similar to the Heidegger program, which a successful impact would unleash on Earth. Or perhaps it’s something worse. Biological terror. We have never allowed one to get close enough to examine it properly.”

  “I’ll drink to that. Are you sure you don’t want anything?”

  “Perhaps a coffee.”

  “Yours?”

  “I’d certainly rather it to that instant swill they provide you with.”

  This was the other reason for Dr. Seth’s in-person visit to Danggood Universal: he had brought Rensselaer five pounds of coffee beans. The smuggling fraternity in the test hab dealt in many things, but the greatest source of their profits was coffee, the example par excellence of a foodstuff that could not be faked up from nutriblocks. Dr. Seth himself connived at this trade.