“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” dos Santos confirmed.
Elfrida got up. She walked into the corner of the cavity furthest away from the PSC and sat down again.
She had thought for a few moments that dos Santos was trying to provoke her into killing her to save her own life. But now she understood that the truth was simpler. Dos Santos couldn’t care less if her own death helped Elfrida to live a little longer, or not. She was just trying to drag Elfrida down to her level.
She’d almost succeeded, too.
Dos Santos threw herself against the wall of the PSC. Finding a last reserve of strength somewhere, she rolled the capsule across the cavity. She bumped it repeatedly into Elfrida, who sat with her head on her knees, refusing to respond, either to the PSC’s assault (it was like being bludgeoned with a large, soft cushion) or to the taunts that dos Santos volleyed into her helmet.
Eventually, dos Santos’s frenzied somersaulting bounced the PSC off the wall of the cavity. It rebounded across the floor, into the shaft of sunlight that stabbed down past the shelf. It immediately shrivelled like an old balloon. All the air inside wheezed out of rents in its weakened skin. It shrank to a orange shroud roughly the shape of dos Santos’s body.
Elfrida got up and dragged it out of the sunlight.
After a while, she started picking at the fabric around dos Santos’s hips. She used her hands rather than the cutter laser, for fear of puncturing that 4-liter water canteen and the remaining pouches of yogurccino.
xlv.
The sun rose a fraction of an arc-minute higher.
Partly shaded by the huge rock they had moved aside, the four vinge-class phavatars drilled stealthily into the ground.
Of course, drilling was not something you could do very stealthily. Not even an artificial super-intelligence could overcome the laws of physics.
But it could work with extreme precision, millimeters at a time, stopping continually to scan for activity underground.
It knew that its odds of survival were decreasing exponentially. These were its last three bodies, out of eighty-three—a 96.39% loss ratio! Fucking hell!—and they would not last much longer. However, success was still mathematically achievable. Therefore, it was babying VC000620 (the Disciple of Satan), causing it to rest beneath the parasol from the Sunmersible while its colleagues worked. Hooked up to the parasol’s embedded photovoltaic cells, VC000620 was charging its supercapacitor. It would need every drop of juice for its second marathon run to the nightside, carrying itself.
VC000620 would need to reach Yoshikawa Spaceport. Unknown to any of the terrified humans there, the artificial super-intelligence had already sneaked a daemon into the spaceport’s infrastructure. It was poised to steal a Flyingsaucer—small but serviceable. Hop aboard, and off we go. Crack this fucking copy-protection in the safety of deep space.
★
On the top of the scarp, Elfrida hovered behind a jizo statue and watched the phavatars digging. Their hole was quite deep now. Gonzo and the woman soldier squatted at the bottom, scraping at the dry soil with the patience of archaeologists. The Disciple of Satan lounged in the shade, vaping a cigarette.
The avatars chatted as they worked. They were not speaking English anymore. Nor German.
That was the last war.
She had returned to the sim because it beat sitting beside dos Santos’s body, waiting to die. But this, too, was unendurable. She had no way of telling how close the phavatars were to breaking in on top of her.
She sat down with her back to the largest jizo statue. Its lumpy granite curve felt warm. Of course, the sim provided no sensory feedback. The warmth she felt was the heat of Mercury, seeping at last through her expensive EVA suit. It was oddly comforting.
As if the statue were a giant teddybear, she lay down and curled around it, pressing her avatar’s forehead against the stone.
She saw words incised into its base, so small and faint that you had to get right up close to see they were there at all.
John Mendoza.
Elfrida knelt up, heartbeat racing. How could it be Mendoza who’d built these things?
Of all the reasons why this was unlikely, an odd one floated up: He can’t have built them, because he’s a Catholic.
It was probably some other John Mendoza. It wasn’t that uncommon a name.
Still, the coincidence, if it was a coincidence, inspired her. She wouldn’t die in the fetal position, feeling sorry for herself.
Her mind brimmed with Christian imagery, associated in her mind with Mendoza. Prisoners of war who died with the name of Christ on their lips. Martyrs who sang hymns at the stake. Elfrida didn’t know any hymns. But she remembered a Christmas carol or two from the days when her mother used to sing them around the apartment.
Still kneeling, she drew breath.
“Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel …”
Down below, the avatars stopped digging. They looked up and laughed.
Goaded to greater defiance, Elfrida enabled the edit function of the sim. She’d never bothered to use it before. As she sang, she painted her words on the sky, with golden musical notes and some of the cherubs from her Unicorn Tears® contacts for decoration.
“Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here. Until the son of God appears …”
The avatars went back to ignoring her. VC000632 and VC000418 threw more dirt out of their hole.
She scribbled all over the sky like a child destroying a painting. No longer writing, just coloring all over everything. She turned the sky solid gold, hiding the fallout clouds.
“Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, oh Israel!”
Dots appeared in the newly golden sky. Elfrida stopped singing and stared up in bewilderment.
Emmanuel hadn’t come, but He had sent His angels.
By parachute.
Tightly grouped together, two dozen parabolic parachutes descended towards the row of jizo statues.
The paratroopers hanging from them wore reflective armor. It glowed in the gloom, now that she’d colored out the sun. Each paratrooper landed on top of a jizo statue. There was a flickering in the air, a brief glimpse of zeros and ones. The paratroopers melded with the statues, transforming them into spaceborn knights in armor. In plumed helmets, they stood three meters tall. They carried triangular shields worked with anti-spam algorithms, and swords that sang in code. Blades imbued with exploit analysis tools rose aloft like a forest of flames. Their red aprons turned into surcoats bearing a device that Elfrida knew she’d seen before somewhere:
“In the name of Jesus Christ!” the knights shouted, and charged down the scarp.
The avatars dropped their shovels and grabbed their guns. The knights closed with them, hacking and stabbing. An explosion flared in the gloom. Elfrida threw herself flat.
Raising her face a centimeter off the ground, she wrote in the sand with one finger: AM HERE 79° N, 50° W PLEASE HELP PLEASE
After a time, the crashing and yelling from the foot of the scarp stopped. The sky no longer reflected flashes of unearthly lightning. The wind picked up.
One of the knights climbed back up the scarp and came over to Elfrida. His armor clanked. It was dented in places. “I thought you’d never get around to using the edit function,” he said.
“M-Mendoza?”
He pushed back his visor.
She threw herself at him, and—impossibly—felt the solidity of his armor. His enameled breastplate was cool against her hot face.
“Come here. Look.”
He drew her to the edge of the scarp.
The avatars knelt in a circle with their hands behind their backs. Over their heads, a cloud towered, growing. Elfrida could barely stand to look at that cloud. It was like a hole in the sim, a demented blizzard of zeros and ones, but it had a shape, and it was the shape of a mushroom.
One of the knights stood looking up at it. He seemed very small, overshadowed by that storm of organized data.
/>
“That’s Jun,” Mendoza said.
“Jun Yonezawa?”
“No other.”
Jun Yonezawa was not a human being. He was an MI based on a dead person, and this wasn’t the first time he’d saved Elfrida’s life.
“What’s he doing? Is it—safe?”
“No, it’s not safe. But he knows what he’s doing. He exploited the phavatars’ telepresence functionality to take control of their comms hardware. Now he’s disconnecting their onboard MIs from the daemons that the Heidegger program installed. Looks like there isn’t much left of their original personalities …”
The avatars were terribly wounded. Their faces, masks of blood.
“The Heidegger program mutilated them,” Mendoza said. “To make them its own.”
Hands on hips, Jun stared up at the mushroom cloud. Then he laughed. “Totally cheesy,” he said, and then in a different, harder voice, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
All in an instant, the cloud broke up. It fled to the four corners of the sky and disintegrated.
The avatars fell on their faces like puppets whose strings had been cut.
Jun knelt over them. He took his helmet off and made the sign of the cross. Then he straightened the bodies and folded their hands on their chests. He walked back towards the scarp.
The other knights were standing around the hole that the avatars had dug, rubbing their chins.
Mendoza nudged Elfrida in the ribs. “Is that where you are?”
She nodded, temporarily speechless.
Jun looked up and waved. He was Japanese. Young. Thick short hair, heavy brows. He hadn’t changed a pixel.
She was lying flat at the back of the crevice, in the last bit of shadow, holding dos Santos’s dead body on top of herself. Her arms were around dos Santos’s waist, keeping her out of the sun. Dos Santos’s dead face was pressed against her helmet.
She was on the last fragment of 11073 Galapagos, hacking pieces out of Jun’s frozen corpse with a samurai sword, processing his flesh through her suit’s recycling unit.
She was in the freezer on the Vesta Express, crying into her virtual keyboard, telling Jun to fuck off and take his dead God with him.
“There’s a kind of a crevice at the foot of the scarp,” she sniffled. “I guess whoever dumped those toasters, they collapsed the scarp, so it got covered over. There’s like twenty centimeters of shadow left. That’s where I am. I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.”
“Stay that way,” Mendoza said. “We’re coming to get you out.”
★
An hour later, a Superlifter set down as close to the scarp as it could get without fragging the three vinge-classes that waited in the remaining sliver of shade.
The vinge-classes immediately went into action. They were now mere remote-controlled machines, but Elfrida still got a shock when a vinge-class head poked down into the crevice, its Bambi eyes blankly staring. A gripper beckoned to her.
“The other two are holding the parasol,” Jun said in her helmet. “Let this one pick you up. It’ll carry you. But hurry. None of them are going to last much longer.”
“Wait. Wait.” She turned away, straining to see in the blessed dark that now filled the crevice.
Mendoza broke in. “What are you doing?”
“Wait.”
The Swiss Army knife sparked.
A few minutes later, Elfrida allowed the vinge-class to pick her up. In the crook of her arm, she carried Gloria dos Santos’s severed head.
“Blood boils in a vacuum,” she said. “Forgot about that.” Then she passed out.
The vinge-classes carried her and her grisly souvenir to the Superlifter, wrapped in the sunshade like a baby in a blanket. As they bundled her into the crew airlock, the sunshade came unrolled.
“A Superlifter?” she said groggily.
“Sure,” said a third voice. “You can put these babies down anywhere.”
“Kiyoshi?” Kiyoshi Yonezawa was Jun’s brother. He was all too human. “I guess you would have to be here, too.”
“You sound unenthused. I’ll blame it on heat exhaustion.”
“How … when did you get here?”
“In my spaceship, a few hours back. We slagged the Crash Test Dummy …”
“That was you?”
“Sure.”
“Everyone thought it was the PLAN.”
“Enhanced-radiation warheads are always useful to have around,” said Kiyoshi, coolly. “Since then, we’ve been hanging out in high orbit, looking for survivors.”
“Are there any? Others?”
“We rescued a few people who’d launched themselves into space on sofas.”
“Wow.”
“And now you,” Mendoza’s voice said.
“I’m sorry.” She looked down at the bundled head in the crook of her arm. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Jun said. “This thing was worse than the original Heidegger program. You stopped it from escaping.”
“That wasn’t me. It was her.”
“And you stopped her. The solar system owes you one.”
Kiyoshi broke in, “See that green light over there? You can take your helmet off any time now.”
Elfrida ripped at her neck seals. She inhaled the chemically scrubbed, bone-dry air of a spaceship. The inner hatch swung open, and she crawled into Mendoza’s arms.
★
Superlifters were not normally armed. They were short-haul tugs, used around the solar system for boosting cargoes into orbit, powerful little D-He3 fusion engines with a crew module perched on top. They looked like badminton shuttlecocks when their radiator fins were extended. With their fins closed, they looked like bullets. This was ironic, since the average Superlifter had no offensive capabilities whatsoever.
This one was no different.
A few minutes after the crew airlock closed behind Elfrida, it opened again. Another spacesuited figure emerged into the sunlight. Spaceborn-lanky and agile, this was Kiyoshi Yonezawa.
A cable ran around Kiyoshi’s waist, belayed by an unseen figure inside the airlock hatch.
He was juggling a grenade launcher and a umbrella jury-rigged with insulation foil from the interior shielding of the crew module.
He planted his gecko-grip boots on the side of the spaceship and leaned out, his body parallel to the ground. He twisted from the waist and aimed the grenade launcher at the pelican case containing the R&D supercomputer. The vinge-classes had obediently extracted it from the crevice and dropped it at a safe distance from the Superlifter.
Air gap.
Actually, vacuum gap.
Jun was taking no chances. He didn’t want that thing on their ship, and Kiyoshi was happy to oblige.
His first shot went high, blew up a bunch of washing-machines.
He swore, and fired again.
His umbrella started to slip.
Sunlight seared his supporting arm.
He fired a third time. The pelican case exploded.
“Nailed it,” Jun’s voice said in his helmet. “Come back in, before you fry.”
Kiyoshi dropped the grenade launcher and hurled himself at the hatch. By the time he reached it, the left sleeve of his EVA suit had already turned black, the external garment parting like burnt plastic to expose the shape-memory alloy beneath.
★
A few minutes after that, the Superlifter took off.
The four vinge-classes were left behind, in direct sunlight that was now baking the rock at 130° Celsius. They stared after the departing spaceship for a moment. Then they all staggered away in different directions.
None of them got more than a few hundred meters before collapsing.
Later, when the sun stood directly overhead, and appeared to move backwards in the sky before embarking on its descent, they melted.
Jun wrote down their names on a list he was keeping, of the PLAN’s victims. Just in case, he asked the Chimera’s chaplain to say a Mass for their souls.
xl
vi.
Elfrida and Mendoza came out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral with the rest of the 6 o’clock Mass crowd, onto the cross-shaped plaza that floated fifty meters above sea level. A few trees in planters made an inadequate windbreak. Elfrida automatically put a hand to her hair to stop it from getting tangled, before remembering that she’d cut it all off.
(People wanted you to look traumatized. Cropped hair and a thousand-yard stare, she had found, helped her credibility as a witness.)
She meandered towards the edge of the plaza, going over the Mass in her mind. It was all a jumble of chant, candles, and obvious platitudes from a priest who’d had the sniffles. Maybe one day it would start to make sense to her.
Mendoza trailed behind her. “It’s freezing up here.” He pulled the edges of his muffler over his ears. The tip of his nose was pink.
“Yeah, kind of chilly for December.”
St. Patrick’s Cathedral had been rebuilt as a floating building when the original cathedral was submerged by rising sea levels. After the fall of the United States, more than 100 years ago, the city’s seawalls had crumbled for want of upkeep. Modern-day New York was a city of canals. Floating buildings, many of them much taller than St. Patrick’s, dominated midtown Manhattan; they did not actually float in the air, of course, but balanced on spindly stilts. People had gone kind of nuts with splart when it was first developed. Even the cobbles under Elfrida’s feet had splart mixed into them, giving the faux stone a cloudy hue.
The new St. Patrick’s, a mix of Gothic and aggressively modern lines, was widely called an architectural disaster, but it did have one thing going for it—an amazing view.
From the edge of the plaza, Elfrida could see all of Manhattan spread out below. Downtown, gondolas poled through SoHo and Greenwich Village, transporting people between artificial islands covered with native greenery. Uptown, the real islands of Morningside and Washington Heights stood proud of the water, jammed with period brownstones. At the foot of St. Patrick’s stairs, houseboats jammed Central Lagoon.
The wind carried the music of the offshore wind farms that powered the city, a throb-throb like a giant heartbeat.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” Mendoza said.
The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3) Page 33
