“Help,” she idly gaze-typed.
The unicorn froze, one hoof in the air. “Do you need help?”
“Yes. Can you get me a network connection, an EVA suit, a toothbrush, and a new life, not necessarily in that order?”
“Are you lost?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want your mommy?”
“Yes,” Elfrida typed.
The unicorn threw up its head. It reared, sparkles cascading from its rainbow-streaked mane. “Paging … Ingrid Haller!” it bellowed. “Your child is waiting for you at … Eagle’s Nest, Little America, Mercury! Any security personnel in this area, please proceed immediately to …Eagle’s Nest, Little America, Mercury … and ensure that … Elfrida Goto … is safe and happy, while we contact her mother … Ingrid Haller!”
“Haller … ler … ler …”
Astonished, Elfrida heard her mother’s name echoing back from afar, as if the unicorn’s announcement had reverberated through the mountain. How had it done that?
Grumpy Doug crashed into the room. “WTF,” he said, spraying Krispy Komet crumbs.
Elfrida heard a siren in the distance. “Ho ho, hee hee,” she said. “You never guessed I wear contacts. I took them out to go through decon. And I guess you didn’t search my clothes.”
“Contacts?”
“You know, network interface contacts? Like children use?”
Grumpy Doug glared at her and subvocalized orders into a comms implant.
“I guess you guys are signatories to the Interplanetary Convention on the Safety of the Child,” Elfrida continued. “Well, I’ve got kiddie contacts. They must have been pre-programmed with universal network access codes for emergencies. So it accessed your tannoy, and now everyone knows I’m here, including the cops on Earth, and—”
“Blocked that,” Grumpy Doug said. “Denied it access to our relay sat.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Hon, I am illegal.” The siren noise doubled, approaching from at least two directions. “Ingrid Haller. Your mother’s name?”
She nodded.
The sound of a helicopter joined the mix. “Stay here.” Doug clattered out of the cabin.
From the window, Elfrida watched security officers spill into the clearing. Doug ambled towards them, presidentially calm.
She dashed back into the bedroom, which faced the other side of the clearing. She threw the window open and jumped down to the grass. Without stopping to think, she darted into the trees.
The undergrowth was denser on this side of the clearing. A branch snagged her sweatshirt. Halting to wrestle it free, she heard crashing noises behind her. Shouts. The squelch of radios.
She ran. Each bound carried her over bushes as tall as herself. She kicked off from the branches of the trees, as if she were maneuvering in zero-gee. Gleefully, she realized that she was outdistancing her pursuers. Being Earthborn gave her an edge. She had not had to pump iron for hours a day to get a barely-normal physique. She had earned her muscles by living in gravity three times stronger than Mercury. I’m getting awa—
She ran straight off the edge of a cliff.
Her momentum carried her out into the void. A glimpse of the gulf below her rammed home a brutal perceptual shift. That silver thread down there wasn’t a cable. It was a river. Those dots—people.
She was falling into a chasm at least a kilometer deep.
She plummetted—
—into a safety net.
Her belly-flop into the near-invisible mesh winded her. She rolled over, wheezing. At the edge of the cliff she’d fallen from, security officers clustered, gesturing at her with their guns.
She squirmed further out into the net, sick with vertigo. The murmuring noise she had heard before engulfed her, now composed of shouts, electronic announcements, and the whooshing of ventilation fans. Below, people walked on the air.
She struggled to her feet and floundered across the net. An orange tag stuck up. She pulled on it, and a square of net came up like a hatch, opening.
“Stop! Ms. Goto, don’t do this!”
She dropped through the hatch. This time, her fall took longer, but she landed better. She hit the next net down feet first, bounced, and scrambled after the people she had seen. They were no longer walking, but soaring away like gymnasts.
What are they scared of? Me, they’re scared of me.
The sides of the chasm towered over her, cliffs festooned with splarted-on balconies and window-boxes of vegetables. American flags rippled in a thermal updraught.
Grumpy Doug jumped into the first net, followed by a lemming-horde of security goons.
The people ahead of Elfrida leapt onto a ledge as wide as a street. It was a street. She bounced out of the net and confronted front doors and lace-curtained windows carved out of the rock. A thousand hobbit holes. Tricycles and bicycles leaned against pot plants. The street was not quite flat. Someone had dropped a child’s ball and it was rolling downhill.
She took off running in the same direction.
She ran past shops, crèches, and public gardens scooped out of the cliffs. The street magically emptied at her approach. Glancing back, she saw Grumpy Doug pounding after her, with several security goons close behind.
She ran faster, desperate to find some way off this exposed street. She came to a sharp bend. The street U-turned around the end of the chasm. This hab was built on the same plan as Hotel Mercury: a spiral ramp wrapping around a central atrium … or in this case, a chasm one kilometer deep, at least two long, and so narrow that she could see the fury on the faces of the security goons hurtling along the other side.
If this is a ginormous copy of Hotel Mercury, there should be radial corridors.
The next public garden she reached, she jinked into it.
Her U-turn around the end of the chasm had marked a change in the scenery. For the worse. One of the sun-lamps in this garden was out. She ran past a group of decrepit oldsters parked on benches, chuckling over a shared tablet. She stopped and gasped, “Which way?”
A crutch pointed at a giant smart poster of President Doug on the back wall of the garden. Below the poster was a door.
She pushed into rock and boomba music, lazy shouts, the cramped dimensions of an asteroid hab. The smells of garlic and toilets assailed her. People grinned at her, didn’t bother to get out of her way. The ones who were horizontal didn’t even bother to get up.
Grumpy Doug crashed into the corridor.
Elfrida sobbed.
People got up for him. They crowded around him like fans mobbing a celebrity. The kind of celebrity who has the gift of making every fan feel like his best friend.
That was precisely President Doug’s gift, Elfrida remembered. And now, Grumpy Doug was having to fake it. He pointed at Elfrida, but got derailed by a small girl who wanted to show him something on her tablet.
Elfrida cackled weakly and started running again.
The corridor ended in a spiral staircase carved out of the rock, filthy with rat droppings.
She ran down.
Into another hab segment.
Looked back, and glimpsed Grumpy Doug sprinting after her, no longer pretending to be presidential.
Another staircase.
Another hab segment.
The sheer scale of this place disoriented her. All she could think of was to keep going down, in hopes of escaping back to the mines.
But the lower she went, the worse everything looked, including the inhabitants. No more cooking smells, no more music, no more public art. Just emaciated human beings sprawled on the floor, wearing interface glasses, the oldest and cheapest way to escape from reality. The lucky ones also had coats. It was so cold down here Elfrida could see her breath. Heat rises, and in Mt. Gotham it had a long way to go.
At last she stumbled into the open.
And coughed on the reek of sewage.
A crush of people shuffled along the bank of the river she’d seen from the top of the chasm. This was the tru
e bottom of the hab. She looked up at the blazing slit in the roof, like a cartoon Milky Way. That was how far down she’d come.
Adults and children perched on the regocrete wall, dangling lines into the river.
River?
No. An open sewer.
No. A water reclamation system.
Oh, ugh.
As exhausted and mindblown as she was, she still felt disgust when she saw dead rats bobbing on a tide of raw turds and urine. She really, really didn’t want to know what those people were fishing for.
The crowd jostled her against the retaining wall. Hip-high on her, thigh-high on the spaceborn. You could easily fall in there.
Ugh, ugh.
Bridges traversed the sewer at intervals. Most were rope-slung, jury-rigged. One was a grandiose arch of stone with a statue (of Doug, natch) at its apex.
She drifted with the crowd. She no longer hoped to find a way out. If there was one, these people would surely have escaped years ago.
They glanced at her, clocking her Earthborn physique. She cringed. Each unwanted eye contact reminded her that these were human beings—not rats, or data points, or pixellated faces in the news story that was already writing itself in her mind: Hab Horror! 10,000 Enslaved By Clone Gang on Mercury.
Bodies jostled against her back, her arms. She reflexively tried to make herself smaller. These people took physical contact for granted. She’d visited plenty of asteroid habs where people had equally poor manners—but always via telepresence, never in the flesh. That made a huge difference. Their casual squeeze-pasts, body odor, and stares activated every defensive reflex in her brain, and she fought the urge to throw her elbows. She felt relief when her personal space opened up..
“You’re under arrest.”
She whipped around, stumbling. “So crowded.”
“What do you expect?” Grumpy Doug said. “It’s rush hour.”
Laughter from the onlookers.
“You have the right to remain silent, or to continue making ignorant observations.”
Cuffs bit her wrists, pinching her skin.
The only thing worse than being arrested, she realized, was being arrested—and being jeered at by spaceborn commuters who thought she was a bad guy.
xxi.
Grumpy Doug towed her by the hood of her sweatshirt through the crowd. Upstream from the stone bridge, an inflatable raft floated on the sewer. It supported a large cage. Inside, a dozen people sat, lay, or paced.
“Feel like spending a few days in there?” Grumpy Doug said. “Look more comfortable than the cabin?”
The street bulged into a plaza lined with shops. Mirrored coating on the overhang of cliff created an early-century vibe of outdated cool. A blue light reflected off the mirrors, revolving atop an octagonal koban with glass walls. Grumpy Doug thrust her inside.
It was just like a koban anyplace (well, any poor place) on Earth. Uniformed police officers worked at screens, drank coffee, consoled a lost child, gave directions to the lost. They all rose to salute Grumpy Doug. He greeted them by name, cracked a joke or two, and guided Elfrida down the spiral stair in the middle of the koban. They landed in a security center below street level, which was more what she would have expected from a clone-run tyranny. Thousands of surveillance screens.
A female officer strip-searched Elfrida and scanned her with every type of ray known to man. This time, they took her contacts.
At least she wasn’t handcuffed again afterwards. She rubbed the weals on her wrists, reminding herself of Earth and its laws. Laws that would save her, if she could only figure out how to invoke them.
Grumpy Doug waited for her in an office as empty as his eyes. A single vid hung on the wall, showing an antique helicopter lifting off a rooftop. Bullets ripped in slow motion through American flags at the edge of the roof, over and over.
Elfrida sat on an ergoform that was broken or jarked, so it didn’t conform to her body, but retained the impression of someone else’s skinnier thighs.
“Well?” Grumpy Doug said.
“Hab Horror: 10,000 Enslaved by Clone Gang on Mercury.” Elfrida listened to how the words sounded, and shook her head. She remembered how the words rush hour had transformed an alien blob into a crowd of commuters. “The media always gets it wrong.”
“Which is why we try to stay off their radar.”
“I’m not a threat.”
“To us? No. But you are a threat to someone.”
Elfrida started to ask who, caught it back. There were so many candidates.
“Made any enemies on Luna lately?”
“Luna? I have some friends there.” She thought of Mendoza. “People I know from work. That’s all.”
“So you don’t know anyone at the UN Leadership in Robotics Institute?”
“LIRR? No, I never—wait, I once attended a conference that was chaired by a LIRR guy. But that was months ago.”
“So, you got no idea why we would have been asked to eliminate you as a favor to LIRR.”
“No, I—what? Eliminate me?”
“Yup.” For the first time, Grumpy Doug’s expression held something other than hostility. “Sorry.”
“You can’t mean this. You don’t mean it.” She sprang up and backed into the corner of the office.
Grumpy Doug followed her trapped gaze to the vid of the helicopter in the wall frame. “Know what that is?”
“N-no. You can’t …”
“The fall of Washington. Our founder, the first Doug—Founder Doug, we call him—escaped in that helicopter when the Soy Latte Party of New York overran Washington in 2170. He hooked up with his rich friends. Commandeered what was left of NASA’s fleet, and fled into exile. They ended up taking refuge in the American colony here. The rest is history, as folks say.”
“Wrightstuff, Inc. is a listed corporation. You’ve got shareholders, partners, you’re subject to UN law, you can’t do this. You can’t hurt me.”
Grumpy Doug pushed the black wing of his fringe back. “UN’s got it all their own way these days. Technology gives them total power over everyone on Earth, directly or indirectly. Ever heard of the ISA? Yes, of course you have. With the exception of a few luddites like yourself, they can not only read all your communications, they can read your freaking thoughts, or what you choose to store in your BCI, which is the same thing for most people. Sure, there’s encryption … but how many people bother? And even then, how do you know the ISA hasn’t figured out how to crack the latest freespeech app from Thumbsucker Corp.? You don’t. So what it comes down to is this: As they used to say in America, love it or leave it.”
Elfrida trembled. She shrank into her corner as he moved closer.
“Once upon a time, people thought technology would be the new equalizer. Power to the people. An end to government control. Well, it turns out that governments can use technology too, and they have bigger budgets.” Grumpy Doug’s mouth quirked. “The US government wasn’t great at technology, surprisingly enough. And look what happened to them. The Big Disconnect. Secessionist movements from coast to shining coast. All to end with a hipster gunman raising a soy latte in the Oval Office, proclaiming an end to tyranny.”
“Don’t hurt me.”
“The new equalizer, Ms. Goto, is the same as the old equalizer. Distance. Once upon a time, people emigrated to the New World to escape repression. Now, they emigrate to the Belt, to the Jovian moons … or to Mercury. The ISA can’t read your comms if you aren’t using the internet. And, even if they do hack your intranet, which ain’t happening here … because, as you mentioned, we’re a listed company, with a ten-figure market capitalization, and IT capacity up the wazoo …the cost of taking action rises proportionately with distance from Earth. So they don’t. Move.”
“Oh my Jesus, forgive me—no, that wasn’t it. Mendoza taught me. Why can’t I remember? Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins—yes—save us from the fires of hell, and—”
“Move.”
It came to Elfrida that what he meant
was, actually, move.
She moved.
Grumpy Doug touched the wall. A hip-wide section concertinaed. The floor ended in a drop into darkness. The reek of sewage drifted up, stronger than ever.
“Are you gonna jump, or would you rather be pushed?”
★
Elfrida stumbled through the darkness. Grumpy Doug followed her, as silent as Death with a better haircut. His flashlight illuminated a damp stone ledge, the gleam of rushing sewage below. She felt the pulse of industrial motors in her breastbone.
Abruptly, a sensor-triggered blaze of light drowned Grumpy Doug’s flashlight. The current vanished under a filth-splattered regocrete platform. On the far side of the platform, grilles jerked up and down. The sewer poured through them, and the solid waste got caught in the grilles. Comb-like attachments then scraped it off into an overhead chute, which slanted down to a giant hopper at the far end of the walkway. Elfrida saw figures servicing the hopper, assumed they were bots, realized after a second that they were humans in hazmat coveralls.
“Help,” she screamed. “Help.”
The noise of machinery crushed her voice.
Grumpy Doug grabbed her arm and pulled her along the platform. “Not another word.”
The hopper loomed over them. Shit-caked hoods peered over the edge. The workers were sorting the refuse, separating recyclables for separate processing. And now Elfrida knew what was going to happen to her. One 67-kilo load of refuse coming up. Classification: BIOWASTE.
She struggled in Grumpy Doug’s grip. His voice seemed to come from a great distance.
“Put the damn coverall on.”
A puddle of orange fabric on the catwalk.
Grumpy Doug was stepping into an identical garment.
“Those’re gecko boots?” he said. “EVA-rated? Keep ‘em on. The coverall seals to them.”
Elfrida fumbled with the preternaturally slippery fabric. The recycling workers watched in silence. When she had the coverall on—it was made for someone much taller—Grumpy Doug led her back to the filter grilles. The nearest one wheezed open. Sewage rapidly built up behind it, oozed across the catwalk, started to spill over the top of the grille.
The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3) Page 17
