“Er,” said Resources.
“Say no more. Your operators were otherwise occupied. Sometimes, I swear, I think they need to be referred to the mental health department.”
“We have a mental health department?”
“It was just an expression.”
“Oh, look,” twittered a third satellite, which handled comms for the Big Dig. “What’s that?”
All the satellites eagerly zoomed in.
The rover had stopped on the rim of Rheasilvia Crater, where rolling scarps sank to the plain that was the unthinkably vast crater’s basin. A person in an EVA suit exited the rover and unfolded a piece of fabric over the vehicle’s roof. A logo became visible.
“There’s your answer,” said the de Grey Institute.
“I don’t get it!” said the Big Dig. “That’s the UNESCO logo. Why is UNESCO coming to see us?”
“Maybe they think you’re using indentured labor,” suggested Resources. “Ha, ha!”
The rover descended into the crater on a switchback course, skidding sideways where the gradient was steepest, throwing up rooster-tails of dust that had not been disturbed since the solar system was young. The satellites watched its progress. Had they been human, they would have held their breath.
The rover reached the floor of the crater.
The PORMS spoke to it.
“XX rover at the given coordinates. Identify yourself immediately.”
“Uh, yeah,” came a faint human voice. “We are an inspection team from UNESCO. We’re en route to the Big Dig to perform an inspection.”
“Yoroshiku ne!” squealed another voice
“Translation,” said a third voice from the rover. “Don’t shoot us, OK?”
“This is a restricted area. Turn back immediately. If you fail to obey this order, area-exclusion measures will be initiated.”
“Are you crazy?” said the de Grey Institute. “They’re from the UN! Shoot them and we’ll all be looking at major legal grief. Plus publicity, which none of us want, amirite?”
“You have ten seconds to comply with this order. Ten … nine …”
At that moment the de Grey Institute satellite’s controller returned to his desk. He was a junior lab assistant who did his duties conscientiously, on the whole. He had just stepped away to grab a snack. Seeing how things stood, he choked and had to clear his throat before he could speak. “José! José! Do you copy?”
“Six … five …”
“For fuck’s sake don’t slag ‘em! The last thing we need is blue berets crawling all over this rock!”
Silence on the air. Silence in the comms cubicle aboard the Vesta Express, where lab assistant Julian Satterthwaite’s mouthful of Cheezy Bytes had turned to ashes on his tongue. Silence in the rover, except for Mendoza gabbling under his breath: “fullofgracethelordbewiththee …”
“Countdown aborted,” said the PORMS. “You have permission to proceed. Follow the course I am about to transmit (attached). Any deviation from this course will trigger area-exclusion protocols. Transmission ends.” <
Satterthwaite slumped on his ergoform, his breath rasping harshly. “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” he said. “You scared the fuck out of me, José.”
“Chill. I was just screwing with their itty bitty minds.”
The PORMS, unlike the other satellites, really was under the control of a human operator at all times, without exception. Satterthwaite had never met José Running Horse, who worked at the Big Dig. But he suspected that he knew where the PORMS got its sociopathic demeanor.
“Figure they’re onto us?” Running Horse said. “If they get too nosy, they might have to have an ‘accident.’”
“It’s probably some World Heritage shit,” Satterthwaite said. “We warned you that bashing holes in Rheasilvia Mons would stir up the conservation crowd.”
“Yeah, well, screw you. You guys in R&D are the ones messing with shit that could kill us, and everyone in the known universe.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“If the UN finds out what you’re up to, we won’t get away with a slap on the wrist.”
“You know nothing about it.”
“I know you just had a narrow fucking escape, Satterthwaite. What if these UN bigots wanted to inspect your facility, instead of ours?”
“Well, they don’t. They haven’t even attempted to communicate with us.” Satterthwaite upended the last of his Cheezy Bytes into his mouth. “Be a mate and take one for the team,” he typed, his screen wavering in the wisps of fog that drifted through the door behind him, from the kilos of dry ice packed as a last-ditch hack around the outside of the de Grey Institute’s supercomputer.
★
“Rheasilvia Mons,” Elfrida read from her contacts. “Tallest peak in the solar system, rising 22 kilometers from the floor of the crater of the same name. Created by an impact … blah, blah … named after Rhea Silvia, a mythological vestal virgin. Rheasilvia Mons is classified as a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value.” She snapped her fingers joyfully. “Boom. That’s it, Mendoza, that’s why we’re here.”
“This isn’t a mountain,” Mendoza said. “It’s a freaking mountain range.”
They appeared to be driving towards a wall. Jagged cliffs and steep cols, illuminated by the light of another Vesta day, filled the sky. Rheasilvia Mons was so vast that it looked more like an allegory than a physical fact. Elfrida twitched. She kept wanting to tweak her settings, as if this were computer-generated topology that was out of whack. Silly, but that was how it looked: like the product of a runaway algorithm, not a real mountain in the real solar system.
“Ookii ne!” said Rurumi.
“Yup,” Elfrida said, glancing at the phavatar with dislike. “Pretty big.”
For four Vestan days they had followed the course transmitted by the PORMS. Their route threaded between craters in the floor of the Rheasilvia impact basin, which was only flat in comparison to the massif at its center. Elfrida and Mendoza had traded shifts at the wheel. Neither of them trusted Rurumi not to antagonize the PORMS by steering off-course.
Now, they were following overlapping sets of tracks in the dust. The width of the tracks suggested they’d been made by vehicles with wheelbases as broad as a four-lane highway. The dotted green line on the rover’s navigation screen followed the tracks up the foothills ahead, into a crater that yawned in the side of Rheasilvia Mons like a cave mouth.
“Can’t we think of a different cover story?” Mendoza said. “I don’t know crap about World Heritage.”
“I do. I grew up in Rome. But OK.”
“So tell me what the Sistine Chapel has in common with this pile of rock.”
“You got me,” Elfrida admitted. “Fine, I’m not married to the idea. But what else is there for us to inspect here?”
Rurumi spoke up. “Um, hey, it’s Gregor. I’ve got an idea …”
★
“Hello, hello?” Elfrida said nervously. “We’re from UNESCO and we’re here to ...”
“Just keep going,” a voice on the radio cut in.
Mendoza raised his eyebrows. Elfrida shrugged. They drove deeper into the cavern, leaving the sunlight behind. The headlights illuminated rubble on the floor.
“Keep going.”
The floor of the cavern began to slope down.
“Mind the drop,” said the voice.
Mendoza’s knuckles whitened on the steering yoke. He nodded speechlessly at the navigation screen. The rover’s radar had automatically reconfigured itself into single-direction pulse mode. The returning pulses sketched a representation of the topography inside the cave. They were driving down a ramp that wound around … and around, and around, and around … a stupendous void, or shaft, inside Rheasilvia Mons. According to the radar, the shaft was five kilometers deep.
“Now I know why they call it the Big Dig,” Elfrida breathed. “Oh my God!”
Headlights flashed, rising towards them. The headlight
s were several meters off the ground.
“Pull over! Pull over!” a robotic voice blared on the public channel.
“Susmaryosep!” Mendoza yanked the wheel over.
To the right.
While the oncoming vehicle also veered to the right.
“Careful!” Elfrida shrieked.
“Collision imminent!”
“I said mind the fucking drop!”
Mere meters from a head-on collision, Mendoza swerved even further to the right, and braked.
The oncoming vehicle scraped past. A tractor the size of a three-storey house pulling an articulated dolly laden with post-processing slag, it was so long that it took three minutes to pass. The whole time, it scolded them to maintain an appropriate distance between vehicles. Two minutes and forty-two seconds into this ordeal, a lump of slag sticking off the dolly tapped the rover’s side, displacing it to the right. The rover’s right rear wheel dropped several centimeters.
“Oh help,” Elfrida whimpered, fumbling her EVA suit’s helmet over her head, in hopes that it would act as a crash helmet when they tumbled to the bottom of the Big Dig.
“No one’s ever fallen off that ramp,” the voice on the radio said unhelpfully.
The rubble-hauler passed.
Mendoza gunned the rover back to the center of the ramp. Behind them, chunks of basalt crumbled into the abyss.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the voice demanded. “Why’d you pull over to the right?”
“We drive on the right,” Mendoza said, his voice shaking. “Like everyone else in the solar system. Except you, apparently.”
“We were founded in the Former United Kingdom,” the voice said after a moment, not quite apologetically. “Thought you knew that.”
“Yes, but … Sigh. Just warn us if there are any more surprises ahead.”
“Oh, lots. But we hope you’ll think they’re nice ones! I’m Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir, by the way. Stakeholder relations coordinator here at the Big Dig.”
Sigurjónsdóttir directed them down the ramp, which flattened out five kilometers below the cavern entrance, four and a half kilometers below the floor of Rheasilvia Crater. The scale of the Big Dig was inhuman. The shaft jinked to the north and then plunged down again, this time at a steep angle. Their radar showed that it bottomed out another nine kilometers below.
“Don’t go down there,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “Lots of robots, the largest diamond-toothed roller cone bit in the solar system, debris flying at the speed of bullets. Look over to your left; there’s an off-ramp. Follow the glowstrips.”
The rover trundled along a horizontal tunnel illuminated by overhead glowstrips, which made it feel reassuringly like a highway tunnel on Earth. It opened out into a cavern the size of a football stadium. They confronted an amazing sight.
At the far end of the cavern, enclosed walkways linked a village of rigid multistorey habs whose walls were muraled with colorful images. And above the village, struts suspended a large farm-in-a-bottle, the colloquial term for a hydroponic farm contained in its own hab bubble.
This bubble was transparent. As they drove closer, Elfrida could see small fish darting among the roots of the plants. UV light rippled down through the farm. Watery shadows quivered on the floor, giving an impression of weather, although the cavern was in hard vacuum.
A golf-cart-sized vehicle whizzed towards them. It had come from a cluster of expandable habs on the far side of the cavern, connected like curvy Legos, bearing the Virgin Atomic logo.
A woman with the same logo on the chest of her EVA suit jumped out of the golf cart. “Hi. Sigurjónsdóttir,” she said over the radio, waving.
Elfrida and Mendoza scrambled into their suits and got out of the rover. “Nice to meet you,” Elfrida said, matching Sigurjónsdóttir’s bow. “I’m Goto, and this is Mendoza. We’re from UNESCO.”
“Well, that explains it,” said the other spacesuit who’d got out of the golf cart. “Just joking.”
“Pay no attention to my colleague,” said Sigurjónsdóttir. “Well, it is nice to meet you, and you’ve come all this way to …?”
“To inspect your educational and training facilities,” Elfrida said. “I understand that you run an apprenticeship program at this site?” This information came from Lovatsky.
“We do,” Sigurjónsdóttir confirmed.
“That’s very laudable, and I’m sure that your apprentices learn a lot, since you’re on the cutting edge of asteroid engineering here,” Elfrida improvised. “But UNESCO does set certain criteria regarding apprenticeship programs, and we just want to confirm that those criteria are being met, which I’m sure they are, but you know.”
“And of course this has nothing to do with any recent goings-on in the Bellicia ecohood!” Sigurjónsdóttir teased merrily. “No, no, pretend I didn’t say that. We’ll be perfectly happy to show you around, of course.”
“Well, that’s great,” Elfrida said. “Smile.”
The other spacesuit stepped forward. “I should introduce myself,” he said. Did Sigurjónsdóttir make a small gesture, as if to stop him from speaking? If so, he ignored her. “I am in fact the leader of the Virgin Atomic apprenticeship program here. My name is Jimmy. Nice to meet you, and I look forward to cooperating to resolve any concerns you may have.”
There was something off about his diction. It sounded a bit stilted. Robotic, even. After their experiences at the refinery, Elfrida was suspicious. Could Jimmy be a phavatar? Some phavatars were made to resemble EVA suits. She reserved judgement. If he was a phavatar or some other kind of bot, she’d know soon enough.
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
Something moved in the golf cart. It was a four-legged pink spacesuit about the size of a terrier. It bounded to Jimmy. Over the public channel, they heard: “Yap! Yap! Yapyapyap!”
“Sorry,” Jimmy said. “This is my beloved dog, Amy.”
Movement blurred in Elfrida’s peripheral vision. Rurumi—whom they’d told to stay in the rover—raced to the EVA-suited dog and knelt to enfold it in her arms. “A real doggie! Kawaiiiii!”
Sigurjónsdóttir moved almost as fast as the phavatar. She whipped a plasma pistol out of a thigh holster. Rurumi looked up. A laser targeting dot floated on the phavatar’s forehead.
Elfrida instinctively lunged forward. Because the left knee of her suit was still fossilized at a 120° angle, she fell flat on her face.
“Oh, cheese,” Sigurjónsdóttir exclaimed, pointing her pistol at the ground. “Are you OK?”
“Yes—yes, I’m fine …”
“I’m very sorry, but you can’t bring a phavatar in here. I’ll have to ask you to leave it in your vehicle.”
“Let me guess,” Mendoza said, helping Elfrida up. “Information security?”
“That’s right,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. She had not yet holstered her weapon. “Phavatars are a significant information security risk, as their uplink functionality can’t be disabled.”
“We can’t get a signal down here, anyway,” Mendoza said. “That’s just the MI proxy. That’s why it acted so dumb. It must have startled you. Sorry about that.”
“No, no, I overreacted. I’m sorry. But our corporate policy …”
Elfrida interrupted, “Not a problem at all! We’ll leave her in the car.” To Rurumi, she transmitted mockingly: “Move it, Ru-chan. Hayaku nori-nasai! Deccha dame yo!”
Rurumi climbed into the rover.
“Jolly good!” Holstering her laser pistol, Sigurjónsdóttir reverted to professional cheerfulness. “Now, can I interest you wayfarers in a cup of tea?”
xv.
Back in the Bellicia ecohood, Dr. James’s bail hearing had been scheduled for SecondLight, and then rescheduled for ThirdDark on account of the crowds outside the community hall. The postponement was supposed to deter the protestors. It didn’t.
Come ThirdDark, when there was usually not a light to be seen in the habitat, a ring of torches bobbed from the koban to the community h
all. This was Justice For David Reid (as Shoshanna had renamed their group), plus a couple of hundred supporters. They surrounded the car which was carrying Dr. James to the community hall.
This car—a Hyundai Robby, resembling a soap bubble on wheels—was the only one on Vesta, for a good reason. In micro-gravity, it was quicker to walk. The protestors easily kept up with the Hyundai, squirting it with pre-recorded taunts from a frequency-hopping transmitter, so the grim-faced peacekeepers inside had no choice but to hear.
Outside the community hall, the protestors closed in. A portable projector unfurled a gigantic holograph of David Reid in his hospital bed. The peacekeepers hustled Dr. James up the steps, to the sound of “No bail for the shooter James!”
“Pretty good turnout,” Shoshanna said, surveying her troops.
“Vigilante! Cowboy! Lock him up and throw away the key!”
“Of course, a lot of them are just here to rubberneck.”
The protestors surged into the community hall, an auditorium without seats. An area in front had been cordoned off and this was where Dr. James now stood, alone but for a young man in a business suit, his Virgin Atomic lawyer. On the stage, Dean Garcia stood behind a lectern. The dean doubled as lay judge in Bellicia’s rare criminal proceedings. Catcalls and chants filled the hall. The holograph of David Reid flickered above the crowd as the person carrying the projector was jostled.
“I wish they hadn’t brought that thing,” Shoshanna said. “It’s in bad taste. Plus, it might remind the dean that … well, never mind.”
Cydney knew what Shoshanna had been going to say: the protestors weren’t squeaky-clean, either. But there had been no suggestion of proceedings against the individuals who’d participated in the raid on the astrophysics lab. For one thing, no one would step forward to identify them. For another, Cydney sensed that the whole community was passively on their side—and she was sure Dean Garcia sensed that, too.
“Order,” boomed a peacekeeper over the PA system. “Order in the court!”
The protestors quieted down. The prosecutor, a meek man who ran a Goan restaurant in town, read out the charges. “The community of Bellicia,” he said, “opposes pre-trial release on the grounds that the accused represents a substantial flight risk.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy Page 37
