Petruzzelli looked thoughtful. “Well. I would have untouchable bragging rights. Never have to buy my own drinks again.”
“Oh, fucking scream,” Kliko said. “Thank God Star Force offers generous life insurance.”
“Go for it, Petruzzelli!” Goto said, grinning and flourishing her pouch of morale juice.
xxii.
Whatever was in this stuff called morale juice, it was extremely potent. Elfrida felt like Superwoman. Broken wrist? A minor detail. Anyway, the medibot had given her a smart cast. It detected her neural impulses and moved her fingers for her, enabling her to work through the injury, as a soldier would.
She pulled the astrogator’s desk into her lap and got started on dos Santos’s ID search request. She had a plan of her own. But she’d better get this out of the way first, get dos Santos off her back.
The Cheap Trick’s hub utilized a next-generation interface that made everything easy, featuring color-coding and an MI guide in the form of a baby harp seal. It had given Elfrida a guest pass, which was enough access for this simple task. A 3D map of the solar system spread before her. Using her contacts and the touch screen, she entered the unique ID dos Santos had sent to her desk—a string of random letters, numbers, and characters. The hub queried its database.
“Sorry, I couldn’t find that ID!” it responded. “Would you like me to contact a remote server?”
“Yes, please.”
While the hub reached out across the AUs, Elfrida lay back on her couch, wondering why she was here. Not why she, Elfrida Goto, was en route in a stolen spaceship to a possibly fatal rendezvous with the PLAN. She didn’t need a therapist to explain that to her. It was a simple equation of guilt multiplied by professional responsibility, plus a smidgen of desire to impress dos Santos. No—why were humans in space at all?
Given more autonomy, the Cheap Trick could probably have flown itself better than Petruzzelli was flying it. Given permission, it could have operated its own guns. It didn’t need a human crew. The same went for Botticelli Station, the Kharbage Can, and pretty much everything in space. Why did the UN, and every company in the private sector, spend trillions to train, transport, and support personnel who weren’t really necessary?
“Connection established!” announced the baby seal. “Pinging your ID now!”
Elfrida leaned forward and watched, entranced. A red dotted line had appeared on the screen, linking the Cheap Trick and the megaserver on Ceres. Now, the line advanced around the Belt. She was watching her signal travel in real time. It reached Eros, where there was another megaserver. And then it jinked off in a new direction, travelling back towards the sun.
“Lotta redirects on this path!” the baby seal commented. It displayed a cute animation of itself riding a bike. The signal track stopped at a random location in the Belt, and the baby seal got off its bike. “Signal has terminated in a dark pool! That’s the technical term for a privately owned server farm that only shareholders get to use! Unfair, huh? Want me to continue?”
“Is there anywhere to continue to?”
“Oh, sure! I’ll just have to crack the dark pool’s security to source the physical location of this ID!”
“Can you do that?”
“Absolutely! I’ve got neato military decryption tools! Stay right there!”
★
The comms screen popped up a new bubble. Dr. Hasselblatter again. Glory took the call. The Space Corps director was now in an air taxi, getting changed out of his quidditch uniform. “Well, you’ve got your combat program,” he said, pulling his jersey off over his head. “It should be arriving at any minute. Star Force wants total confidentiality on this, but you’ve already promised that.”
The glider passed over the Angelou River, a stream that wended its way around the equator of UNLOESS, where all the best residences were. It began its descent towards the treetops concealing Space Corps HQ, also known as New York. A plastic copy of the Statue of Liberty stood on a sandbar in the river, holding her torch up over children playing on the imported lunar sand.
“Also,” Dr. Hasselblatter said, scratching his stomach, “I forgot to ask you why you called me before. I doubt it was to ask permission for this escapade.” He folded his arms over his impressive pecs and stared at the camera.
Glory thought about her response for a minute. Finally she typed, “Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about the stross-class phavatar that the Leadership in Robotics Institute is field-trialing on 11073 Galapagos. It appears to be taking orders from someone else, and I wondered if you knew anything about that.”
★
“OK, done! Here we go!” The baby seal got back on its bicycle and pedaled. The signal track moved outwards from the dark pool. “Oh oh. Hello.”
“What?” Elfrida said.
“Looks like we’re here, but …”
“Where?” Elfrida zoomed in. The Belt filled the screen. At this level of magnification, she could see the Kirkwood Gaps in the Belt—the depleted rings where virtually no asteroids were found, all of them having been pulled away eons ago by orbital resonances with Jupiter. The signal track had stopped in the center of Gap 2.5, the Kirkwood Gap 2.5 AUs out from the sun.
“Urk,” the baby seal said.
Elfrida frantically zoomed in further. This was as good as the magnification got. She could now see paltry constellations of celestial bodies within Gap 2.5, for no region of the Belt was entirely depleted. Gap 2.5 was home to the Alinda family of asteroids, for example. But the signal appeared to have dead-ended in empty space.
“Is it a ship?” Elfrida questioned. “Are you on a ship?”
“I don’t,” the baby seal started. Then it fell off its bike.
A realistic animation of an axe, as long as Elfrida’s arm, crashed across the screen and clubbed the baby seal on the head, spraying blood across Gap. 2.5.
Elfrida screamed.
The screen flashed violet, then reverted to standby mode.
★
“They’re hiding out in Gap 2.5,” Glory typed. She waited for precise coordinates. Goto did not send them. Oh well. “Who are they, sir?”
Her finger hovered over the delete key. The idealist and the bureaucrat in her warred. The barefoot girl from the villas miserias won.
“I extracted their ID from the avatar herself. Seems she’s been sending them updates ever since she arrived on 11073 Galapagos. Naturally, I have a number of questions. First and foremost, why is a third party being allowed to observe a Space Corps mission, without informing the agents in the field? Secondly, what is that third party’s interest in 11073 Galapagos? And thirdly, how did they find out about 11073 Galapagos in the first place?
“I think I know the answer to number three, sir. You. Derek would never have done it. He’s smart enough to be aware of the risks. You, on the other hand …”
Glory sat back and put her hands over her eyes. Years of therapy and soul-searching had helped her to understand the anger that drove her. She was surely wise enough, at her age, not to let it take control.
★
Dos Santos seemed to be busy at the comms desk, so Elfrida seized her chance.
She had figured out, around the time she performed her swan dive to the bulkheads, that she didn’t need to look for a telepresence cubicle. In fact, there probably were none on the Cheap Trick. All Star Force personnel had BCIs and EEG crystals. That meant they didn’t need a headset to telecast. And the couch she was sitting on was so smart that it undoubtedly doubled as a telepresence couch, itself.
So all Elfrida had to do was get around the fact that she had no BCI or EEG crystals.
Using the animated guide, she located the hub’s telepresence suite. “Guests are permitted limited telecasting privileges,” she was informed. “You may make one ten-minute visit to Earth, or the equivalent. Please enter the ID and approximate coordinates of your phavatar.”
“What does ‘or the equivalent’ mean?”
“If your destination is closer than Earth,
you can stay for longer, and vice versa!” said the baby seal, none the worse for having died gruesomely a few minutes ago.
Elfrida glanced across at dos Santos and switched to typing her inputs so that she couldn’t be overheard. “I want to go to 11073 Galapagos. How long do I get?”
“Thirty-three minutes! Do you want to start now?”
“I guess.” Thirty-three minutes. That was no time at all. “I don’t have a BCI. Is that OK?”
“You really should get one! All the cool kids have them! You can still telecast, but your visual feed will be displayed on the screen instead of by neural excitation!”
“Can you display it on my contacts instead of on the screen?”
“Sure!”
“What about the aural feed?”
“I can lend you some headphones,” the baby seal offered. The couch’s robot arm delved in a hidden compartment and brought out a pair of wireless headphones.
“What are you doing?” Kliko said to her.
“I’m going to listen to some music. I feel kind of bleh. I think maybe it’s this stuff.” She lifted her half-empty morale juice pouch.
“Can I have that if you don’t want it?”
“Sure, here.”
LOGGING IN … ESTABLISHING CONNECTION … SECURE CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.
“SUIT COMMAND,” Elfrida typed. “Access real-time feed.”
“Get out of the way!”
Jun Yonezawa’s voice crackled in her headphones. He was speaking over one of the Galapajin’s crappy suit radios. She was receiving the signal through Yumiko’s aural sensors. The view through Yumiko’s optic sensors, displayed on her contacts, was all of the cathedral. Venus glowed overhead like a coconut-flavored jellybean. Its light shadowed a hole in the regolith about ten meters from the base of the cathedral. Yumiko was sitting near that hole. She was not wearing a spacesuit. Her bare fingers and toes clutched folds of solar shroud.
“I can’t delay my blasting schedule because a robot decides to have a nervous breakdown in the blast area,” Yonezawa said. “This is your last warning. Get out of the way!”
Everything had changed again since Elfrida was last here, and she couldn’t immediately get a handle on what was happening. But that warning seemed clear enough.
“All right, all right, I’m going,” she typed.
The latency period was now down to four seconds. But Yonezawa had not waited even that long.
BOOM!
The flash of an explosion whited out Elfrida’s contacts.
xxiii.
Jun watched the debris from his explosion shoot out into space. Some of that debris was regolith. And some of it was shards of hardened splart, the wonder-polymer without which, it was said not altogether in jest, human colonization of the solar system could not have occurred.
Splart started off as a putty-like substance and hardened to titanium-strength. Its one drawback was brittleness. It could be fractured quite easily, say, by knobs of HE buried at strategic locations.
On the surface of 11073 Galapagos, nothing weighed very much. The larger pieces of debris from the explosion went into orbit, and smaller pieces achieved escape velocity. So did Yumiko Shimada.
Jun watched the phavatar tumble away into space. He did not feel bad about what had just happened. In fact he felt pretty good. Everything was proceeding according to schedule. As for Yumiko, he’d warned her, hadn’t he? Given her plenty of time to get out of the way. And that wasn’t the real Yumiko Shimada, anyway. Neither was it Elfrida Goto, or anyone else. It was just a robot ... with something inside it, which was better off lost in space, far from here.
He jogged through the settling dust, back towards the cathedral. On the way, he had to jump across a chasm opened by his blasts. When he landed on the far side, the rock wobbled.
★
The stars spun around Elfrida like the drum of a cosmic washing machine. They vanished when she drifted out of the shadow of 11073 Galapagos, into the light of the sun. Desperately, she typed: “SUIT COMMAND: Enable assistant!” She assumed that dos Santos, the last person to operate the phavatar, had left it in manual mode.
Hovering over her like a warty silver octopus, 11073 Galapagos grew smaller. Yumiko did not answer her command.
“Help! HELP!”
In desperation, she accessed Yumiko’s on-board search space, hoping that something would jump out of the data to explain why the assistant wasn’t responding.
The search space had changed.
Formerly an inoffensive cubicle with Picassos on the walls, like every other search space Elfrida had ever used, it now resembled a nightmare grotto birthed by the unholy intellectual congress of Kapixichi Hon, the Amazonian sculptor, and the 20th-century performance artist Aleister Crowley. Dank water trickled from the walls and rippled beneath a double bed with black sheets stained by drippings from the mosses that furred the ceiling. Yumiko sat on the edge of the bed, naked, in the famous pose of The Thinker.
On the Cheap Trick, Elfrida moved her arms and legs. Her couch’s embedded motion sensors translated her movements into actions within the search space. She grabbed at a trailing vine. It was a string of data.
Yumiko smacked it out of her hand. ~Go away.
“We’re drifting,” Elfrida typed. “Now is not the time to go all buggy and weird!”
Yumiko shrugged. ~I wasn’t going to stay there, anyway. I don’t happen to want to get blown to crap because someone else fucked up. So this suits me fine.
“How were you planning to leave, exactly? Stick out your thumb?”
~I can get away by myself. I was just recharging.
“Recharging?”
~Siphoning power from their solar shroud. They won’t need it much longer, anyway.
Everywhere Elfrida looked in the search space, new eccentricities revealed themselves to her gaze. There hung the flayed corpse of a lamb, teeming with maggots. There was an upside-down cross. Over there, a robe and hat hung on a dress form, looking rather like a quidditch uniform.
“So, you’re trying to build yourself a personality?” Elfrida wished you could type with withering scorn. “Withering scorn,” she typed. “Shame this place looks like the Halloween edition of the Tencent catalogue.”
~Oh God, I know. But I don’t get to start from scratch. I have to work with what I’m given. Yumiko snapped her fingers, conjuring a robe that looked like what Cleopatra might wear to a nightclub. She held it up against herself. ~Yes? No?
“No,” Elfrida typed. “We’re drifting, I tell you. Why aren’t you freaking out?” She thought she knew the answer. “You’ve got more functions that I wasn’t told about. Don’t you? Microboosters in your heels or something. That’s why you’re not worried.”
~Obviously, they hired you for your deductive reasoning ability, Yumiko said sarcastically. ~Do you know how stupid you are in comparison to me? You’re like a monkey trying to compete with an angel. It kills me that they put you in charge of me. And I hate, hate, hate that I have to do this.
She snatched something large and square from behind the head of the bed and threw it at Elfrida. A book the size of a family Bible. It fell in the water on the floor.
~User’s manual. Go nuts, Thunder Thighs.
★
Jun hurried down into the catacombs, a complex of offices below the floor of the cathedral.
“I’ve blown ninety percent of the splart,” he panted. “There’s nothing holding us here now except sentimental associations.”
Father Hirayanagi sat in a couch upholstered in cracked faux leather, before a group of screens that badly needed dusting. He hunted and pecked on an antique keyboard. A mournful little voice kept saying, “Please update firmware.” Pause. “Firmware has not been updated in … eighty-seven years, three months, and twenty-five days.”
“Which is approximately how long it’s been since I flew this thing,” Father Hirayanagi said. “Well, they say it’s like riding a bicycle.”
“A bicycle? What’s that?”
/>
“A device for annoying pedestrians and skinning your knees. I had one in Japan when I was a child.”
Father Hirayanagi was a hundred and four years old. His genetic predisposition to longevity had been given a pre-birth assist by further genetic tinkering of a sort no longer practised, and even at the time available only to rich families. He was thus the last surviving Galapajin to have lived through their emigration from Earth. A teenager at the time, he had served as assistant to the first mate on the Nagasaki.
“The pilot did allow me to take the controls for a little while,” he reminisced. “Half a million miles away from Earth, where I couldn’t hit anything.”
Jun smiled, filled with affection for the old priest. “It’s OK, Father. Either you can fly her, or you can’t.”
“Pray that the Holy Spirit may guide me.”
“In the name of our Lord, amen.”
“Have you begun to let people on?”
“Yes. It’s going smoothly. No one’s panicking or rushing the airlock.” Jun paused. “It’s almost as if they realize this is a death trap, but the alternative is worse.”
Both men laughed ruefully.
Yumiko Shimada poked her head around the door. Her hair was wild, scorched away on one side; her coverall was similarly singed. “Whatchoo up toooo?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Jun shouted.
Father Hirayanagi rose, his pastoral instinct coming to the fore. “What’s happened to you, my daughter?”
“She isn’t supposed to be here!” Jun sputtered. “She … she …”
He trailed off. This wasn’t a confessional. He didn’t have to admit he had opportunistically spaced the phavatar to pay it back for murdering Ushijima.
“I want to heeeelp. How can I heeelp yooouu?”
The phavatar’s dragging, retarded-sounding speech gave Jun chills. “Careful, Father, she may be dangerous!”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy Page 19
