Rensselaer’s first concern was for Miranda. When the little girl had finally responded to her suit’s injections of adrenaline and methylphenidate, he sat back on his heels and regarded the universe.
He remembered his last thought before blacking out.
“I saw it,” he told the others.
“What?”
“The ship that attacked us. I saw it, before we lost our comms. Computed its trajectory …
“It wasn’t the PLAN. It was the ship that should have been protecting us from the PLAN, the UNSF Crash Test Dummy.”
xxxviii.
“How are we coping with the heat?” Elfrida said, breaking the silence in the Sunmersible.
“Laugh. Titanium treads, baby. You could barbecue a steak on those rocks, but our trusty pal doesn’t give a crap.”
“I wish our trusty pal went a bit faster.”
“You poor kid. You’re all in.” Dos Santos glanced over at her. The sympathy in her eyes looked real. “Get some sleep.”
“I guess I will.” Elfrida snuggled down in the passenger seat, nuzzling the backrest until a dent formed to support her head.
She closed her eyes. But she did not go to sleep.
She dived back into Dr. Hasselblatter’s sim.
In the sim, the dayside of Mercury was a quartz wonderland. The designers had toned down the sunlight to the equivalent of a bright day in the Himalayas. Elfrida located herself accurately within the sim, as she had in the rover, by syncing the Sunmersible’s radar data with the satellite map that the sim was built on. Then she watched the scenery bump past.
3D graffiti tags, installations of funhouse mirrors, pools of lead that would liquefy at noon, obelisks, cairns, stupas, even a copy of the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer …
VOTE FOR HASSELBLATTER, she remembered. MOAR ART.
She ranged into the distance, zooming in on any feature that interested her. On a ridge about ten kilometers away, she spied a row of squat objects. She flew her viewpoint over them … and got such a shock that it nearly threw her out of the sim.
The objects were jizo statues, the ancient Shinto idols found at Japanese temples and roadside shrines. The volcanic eruption and tsunami that submerged Japan in 2235 had, of course, swept the country’s jizo away. Nowadays, real ones fetched thousands at auction. These were cut-and-paste copies of the famous Nagano Jizo: granite statues of babyish old men with weathered pot-bellies and smug expressions. They wore red aprons and red knitted caps. However, they were each two meters tall, instead of knee-height. Their bulk gave them a forbidding presence. Their shadows stretched out into the Mercurian morning.
Elfrida remembered her Baba, her great-grandmother, showing her a row of jizo statues on a mountainside in Yamanaka prefecture. Baba had not been a real person, of course. She’d been an MI, existing only in the immersion environment that Elfrida’s father had built to help her learn Japanese.
The jizo are there to stop evil spirits from coming down from the mountains, Baba had explained. They protect us.
Elfrida floated closer to the row of jizo in the sim. They squatted on top of a scarp that looked to rise about ten meters above the plain to the west. She searched for a call-out tag that would tell her who’d installed them. This must have been a lot of work. It was hard to imagine the software artist not signing his or her name. But apparently, they hadn’t.
She blinked the sim away and sat up, a stale taste in her mouth. She must’ve dozed off without intending to. Maybe she’d dreamed the jizo.
A glance at the radar plot told her she hadn’t dreamed the terrain they occupied.
“Dos Santos, look at that scarp!”
“Yeah. It’s in our way. We’re gonna have to go around.”
“Have we got time for that?”
“Have you got any other ideas?”
Elfrida reached into the bags under her feet and came up with a yogurt smoothie. Luke-warm, it slaked her thirst without being satisfying.
The Sunmersible veered north. Detouring around the scarp would cost them 80 kilometers.
Elfrida opened her mouth to say that there had to be a better way of doing this. At that moment, the Sunmersible leapt into the air like a startled cat. It hit the ground sideways and rolled over twice before landing lopsidedly on its broken rear axle.
Elfrida dragged herself, half-stunned, off the floor.
Dos Santos was screaming at her. “Suit up! Out! Now!” She backflipped out of the driver’s seat. “Where’s my fucking helmet?”
Elfrida grabbed her own helmet, and Angelica Lin’s handbag. She squeezed into the airlock with dos Santos. “What happened?” She felt slow, stupid. She’d whacked her head on the roof. She was having trouble grasping this new emergency.
“They’re shooting at us.” Dos Santos fitted her helmet on. Their next words were exchanged by suit-to-suit radio, as the airlock chamber emptied. “I figure they missed by a few centimeters. Next time, they won’t.”
“Next time?”
“They fragged the satellites. There were a lot of sats up there. So, there’s now a lot of space debris. They’re probably having to dodge all over the sky to avoid it. That can play havoc with your targeting.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“At a guess? The Crash Test Dummy. The vinge-classes must’ve taken those GTVs into orbit, docked with the Dummy. I was hoping Star Force wouldn’t let that happen. Should’ve known better. We can’t stay here, the rear axle’s gone and we’re a sitting duck. Out, out.”
Elfrida stumbled into out incandescent light. Her suit wailed in disapproval. Dos Santos jumped on tiptoe, grabbing for the edge of the crumpled parasol-cum-solar-array. It came loose from the Sunmersible’s roof and billowed down on top of her.
“Grab the other side!”
Elfrida dived for the parasol. Understanding what dos Santos was doing, she wriggled under the heavy folds of material.
They struggled upright, so that the ex-parasol became a tent with two living poles.
“Walk.”
“I’m too hot,” Elfrida’s suit sobbed.
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“I was talking to my suit. How hot is it?”
“You do not want to know.”
The rocks they walked upon were so hellishly hot that after just a few minutes, Elfrida began to feel the heat through the soles of her boots. She kept her head down, balancing her share of the parasol’s weight on her shoulders, like her Japanese ancestors on festival days, when they would carry their o-mikoshi shrines around town.
Another tremor shook the ground.
“There goes the Sunmersible,” dos Santos said.
“Why aren’t they shooting at us?”
“Maybe they can’t see us under this thing,” dos Santos said.
“I guess maybe not.”
Or maybe, Elfrida thought, they figure it would be a waste of a missile.
She gritted her teeth. “Ten kilometers to the scarp. We can do it.”
They walked on.
xxxix.
~Frug it! President Doug subvocalized. ~Missed! Doug was close enough to see fresh drops of sweat at his hairline. He suspected that President Doug had not meant to say that. It was a lot harder to control involuntary outbursts when you were subvocalizing, than when you were speaking. As well as which: frug it? No one over the age of eight said that.
He was still learning new things about this president.
~What’d you miss, Doug? Something I should know about?
President Doug smiled unconvincingly. ~Remember that kinetic weapon I put into orbit last year?
~Yeah, the Anti-Impact Monitoring and Automatic Defense System. The poor man’s PORMS.
~Frug! Frug! Frug!
~What is it, Doug?
~It’s gone! It can’t be gone! Re-transmit … come on, come on … I don’t believe this!
~Back up. What’s happening?
~It must have been the Crash Test Dummy. It took the AI
MADS out. I’m gonna crash that sucker into the sun.
~Destroying the evidence, huh?
President Doug dropped his hands to his sides. His eyes pleaded for understanding. Forgiveness.
They knew each other so well.
But Doug hadn’t known the president well enough.
From long experience, he kept his emotions out of his subvocalization. ~I’m asking, Doug, because there is going to be the mother of all investigations when this is done. The whole solar system’s gonna want to know what happened. And the less evidence there is, the more suspicious folks will be. We will need an airtight story.
~We’ve got one.
~No, Doug. “Whoops” is not a story. Folks are gonna want a culprit. Someone to bury. Mike Vlajkovic? Not important enough. No one ever heard of him.
~Angelica Lin.
~Lin? What’s her motive?
~Crazy doesn’t need a motive. She believed in that personhood shit. She thought the Heidegger program was misunderstood. She wanted to give it a second chance. How the fuck would I know?
There was a ring of truth to that. Doug figured Lin really had been involved in some regard. Not that it mattered.
~We can say anything, President Doug insisted. ~The dead don’t defend themselves.
~Do you know she’s dead? Because I don’t. I didn’t see her body.
~No, well, she got away. Took that old tourist bus we sold to UNVRP. But not to worry …
~That was her you were shooting at, Doug realized.
~And I missed, unfortunately. Lotta space debris up there. And now I’ve lost the AIMADS … Worry clouded President Doug’s face. ~But she can’t survive, he subvocalized—again, talking more to himself than Doug. ~She’s out there in the frugging sunlight!
Sucked to be Angelica Lin. But Doug didn’t really care about her plight right now. Maybe she’d been tricked into pushing the wrong button. But she hadn’t known where the other button was.
The one that mattered.
The one that switched the Heidegger program off.
~How’d you find out about that, Doug? he subvocalized.
~About what?
~The secret of your historic victory. The off switch.
A smirk flickered across President Doug’s lips. Doug saw that he could not help being proud of himself, and that was the worst revelation of all. ~I keep up with developments in the field.
~The field of what? Genocide studies?
Regretting that jab, Doug glanced down at the vinge-classes piled on the Barge of Shame. Hundreds of people were hanging over the river, vidding them. When Mt. Gotham’s comms were restored, these images would flash around the solar system, proving that American grit and technology had triumphed, once again, over evil.
Except the real evil was right here, so close that Doug could smell it.
~I did it for us, Doug! The president sensed his revulsion, although he hadn’t expressed it. ~For our children.
Doug was no longer listening. His heartbeat raced. Unconsciously, he drove his hands into his pockets. The man in front of him, his genetic spit and image, had vanished entirely up his own ass. When had it happened? Impossible, now, to look back and say, this was where he went wrong.
Maybe President Doug’s shadowy cronies on Luna had whispered in his ear, corrupting him with promises of wealth, sovereignty, and He3-fuelled market power that would enable him to restore the United States of America.
Or maybe the problem was in his genes. The genes Doug shared.
But to think that would be to succumb to despair. His buddies in the NHRE had warned him time and again against that. A little bit of cynicism goes a long way. Too much, and you risk turning into the thing you hate.
~Bro, we’ve been bleeding red ink. President Doug was still subvocalizing at him. ~I do not want to start chasing down asteroid colonists and repossessing their rocks. Those folks out on the NEOs are the future—
~Of the second American empire?
~Paraterraforming. We need every gram of He3 on this planet to make it happen. Anyway, why should the supermajors get it? They own everything else already. Private property is under siege. The little guy can’t catch a break.
Doug believed all that, too. That was why he’d been enthusiastic about the He3 mine in the first place. That was why he hadn’t breathed a word to anyone about the Tolkien Crater deposits. There were sure to be more deposits in the other permanently shadowed polar craters. And it all belonged to Wrightstuff, Inc. … for now. Let their competitors find out about it, and the bastards would move in. Contest Wrightstuff, Inc’s claim in court, while they flayed the planet to the bone. It was all about de facto control, this far from Earth.
Doug took a moment, scratching the little scar on his chin, which had been inflicted on him thirty years ago, after the boy who would become president had fallen off his bike and cut himself.
The Secret Service was watching him and the president, but no one else was. The crowd roared ecstatically, less in response to Dopey Doug (a foamcore moose would’ve been more charismatic) than because patriotism, the opiate of space colonists, had kicked in. Flags rippled like red, white, and blue fur on the cliffs. The balconies vibrated with clapping hands and whooping mouths. It didn’t mean anything to these folks that hundreds of people had died, and hundreds more were still in danger. They’d never met them, anyway.
“Liberty,” President Doug said, echoing Dopey Doug under his breath. “Independence. Freedom. These are the values we …”
“Aw, shit, you fucking murderer,” Doug said. He swung President Doug around into a face-to-face embrace, and stabbed him under the ribs with his mechanic’s cutter laser.
President Doug died instantly. He slumped on Doug’s shoulder, his last hot breath rattling into Doug’s ear. Doug shoved the body away from him, onto the nearest Secret Service guy, and jumped up onto the podium. He knew that he had done the wrong thing in a moment of blind rage, but it had been for the right reasons. He now had a few seconds to convince everyone else of that.
He elbowed Dopey Doug off the podium. The crowd murmured in confusion. The illusion was breaking down.
“This is an emergency announcement,” Doug shouted. The tannoy amplified his words around the inside of the mountain. “The residents of UNVRP HQ need our help. Everyone with access to a fabber, listen up. I need you to download the template I’m gonna send you right now—here it comes. It is a template for an EVA suit. Basic, but it functions, so get printing. Folks, brethren and sistren, fellow Americans … we are going outside.”
The phavatars in the Barge of Shame stood up, shaking off splinters of splart. The ones that had been on the bottom of the pile still had pieces of deck stuck to their frames.
“Whoops,” Doug said. Again, his words reverberated throughout Mt. Gotham. “Should’ve used more splart.”
The phavatars cannonballed into the water. Too heavy to swim, they vanished from sight.
People craned over the retaining walls. The first phavatar resurfaced, leaping vertically out of the river like a sludge-covered ball of wire.
The laughter stopped. The stampede started.
Microseconds after that, the shooting started.
Doug leaned on the podium, momentarily overwhelmed. Doug, he told himself, in hindsight, it wasn’t real smart to kill the guy who knew how to switch them off.
Then the world punched him in the chest, knocking him off the podium. He would never know who shot him. It didn’t matter, in the end.
xl.
Under the parasol, Elfrida and dos Santos shuffled along in blackness hemmed by splinters of light. Elfrida shared her copy of the sim with dos Santos so they could see where they were going. With the sim enabled, they seemed to be walking across a plain resembling a salt flat, towards the row of jizo statues.
At each step, they had to kick the parasol forward a bit. “It’s like walking in a long dress,” dos Santos said. “The kind of thing you have to wear on Luna.” She changed her avatar’s clothing
to a gown of Shackleton City-approved cut, and kicked playfully at its hem.
Dos Santos’s avatar looked like Elfrida remembered her from Botticelli Station. Tawny skin, shaggy blonde curls. Laughter lines around a generous mouth. All packaged with a survival instinct inculcated in the Sao Paulo slums.
Stick with me and we’ll live through this.
The pain in Elfrida’s feet mocked her thoughts. Her suit had been whimpering for some time that the grips of its boots were being degraded. Now it was telling her that they were pretty much melted through. “Sorry, can we stop for a minute? My boots …”
She blinked the sim out of the way to get a look at her soles. This time, her suit’s hysteria had not been exaggerated. The dry-grips of her boots were gone, melted off. She was walking on the exterior liner, which had a higher heat tolerance, but was showing signs of scorching.
“You know what this means,” dos Santos said. She had taken advantage of the halt to check her own boots.
“What?”
“Crawl.”
They rolled the parasol into a tube and crawled inside it, as if they were hamsters in a wheel. After a subjective eternity of tortuous progress, they labored up to the backs of the jizo statues. It was 7:38 in the morning, Mercury time.
Elfrida’s head collided with something that wasn’t there.
“Ow!” She blinked the sim away. “I just bumped into …”
They untangled themselves from the parasol and lifted its front edge off the ground.
The pool of shadow now engulfed a toaster.
“Oh my dog,” Elfrida said giddily. “My parents have one just like that! Well, ours doesn’t have a screen. This must be the new model.”
They lifted the edge of the parasol at other points. They had crawled into a junkyard. One of the local OEMs had abandoned several thousand toasters, plus a thousand or so washing-machines, on top of the scarp.
“Cancelled order?” Elfrida pondered. “Or maybe they were defective.”
“Not defective.” Dos Santos had dragged one of the toasters in under the sunshade. She pried at its battery cover.
The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3) Page 29
