The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy

by Felix R. Savage

  As Dr. James approached Colonel Threadley, who was about to scatter Shoshanna Doyle’s ashes, he shook out a white shawl with black stripes at both ends and velcroed it over his helmet. Everyone stared in amazement.

  “Give me that,” Dr. James said to Colonel Threadley.

  “Huh?”

  “The ashes.” Dr. James held out his glove.

  Threadley deposited the vial in it.

  Dr. James knelt, using Threadley’s legs as a handhold to push himself down to the deck. Hunching over the vial of ashes, he began to chant. “Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba; b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei …”

  Chills raced up and down Kiyoshi’s spine. The chant sounded alien, and yet familiar. Tears trickled down his cheeks inside his helmet, unsummoned, impossible to wipe away.

  As if equally affected—though Kiyoshi didn’t think they could be—the ISA officers remained silent until Dr. James had finished his prayer. The professor floated up on his tether and cast Shoshanna’s ashes into space. Returning to the deck, he removed his tallit and yarmulke. “I believe her family would have wanted that,” he explained. “She was Jewish, after all.”

  “I’ve never been sure,” Threadley said. “Are Jews purebloods or not?”

  “Depends on your definition. Most Sephardim and Beta Israelis qualify. Most Ashkenazi, like myself and Shoshanna, do not. To know for sure, you’d have to ask that.” Dr. James jerked his thumb at the hulk of the Vesta Express, which trailed after the Imagine Dragons like a dead caterpillar on a leash.

  “Oh, I’ll ask it,” Threadley said. “Although, that question might come pretty far down on the list. I’ve got a team over there right now, packing it up for transport to a secure ISA facility.”

  There was that. The boss-man, it turned out, had been wrong about the ISA’s intentions. They didn’t want to frag the Heidegger program after all, they wanted to confiscate it.

  “By the way, Professor,” Threadley said, “weren’t you sitting in on that meeting that was meant to give the president scientific cover for her decision?”

  “I left early,” Dr. James said. “I’d had enough. The presidential decision isn’t going to be the one you were expecting, or the one I hoped for. UNVRP has done an end run around the whole debate.”

  He explained that 4 Vesta was to have a temporary reprieve, after all … and that definitely included Little Sister and the hardware she came with.

  The news ruined Kiyoshi’s mood. This looked—not only to him, but to the ISA officers, judging by their exclamations—like outright treachery from Elfrida Goto. Kiyoshi could have kicked himself for trusting her. After all, she worked for the UN. At the end of the day, that was all you needed to know about anyone.

  Back on the bridge, an officer proposed a motion to fetch Elfrida out of her telepresence cubicle “and freaking scrag her.” Threadley vetoed that, but vowed that she would know the wrath of the ISA on their way back to Earth.

  “We were going to frag that mess on the surface and remove the original program for safekeeping,” Threadley said ruefully. “No one would have had to be the wiser. The ISA is the only organization with sufficient security expertise to handle hostile ‘ware of this caliber. Now it’s going to be handed over to a bunch of civilians. Cheer up, people: with any luck it will lobotomize the lot of them, and we’ll have fewer pro-AI scientists kicking around the system.”

  The officers filed off the bridge, muttering darkly. Threadley held Kiyoshi back with a hand on his elbow. Kiyoshi shook him off and said, “You’d just have made the same mistakes the civilians are going to make, faster. There’s only one thing that should be done with that thing and that is to destroy it.”

  “Oh, yeah.“ Threadley held his eyes. “You come from a rock that got slagged by the PLAN, don’t you?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with that,” Kiyoshi said. “I had a conversion experience back there. I realized that Jesus Christ is my savior. And what brought me to that realization, was coming eyeball to eyeball with evil, and hearing evil itself speak to me. The PLAN is Satan. My people were right all along. It’s just so obvious to me now. The neuroware rewires human brains so they’re vulnerable to demonic possession. When you talk to a meat puppet, you’re talking to a fiend out of Hell. And once you realize that, you kind of have to accept Jesus as your savior, or curl up in a ball and self-euthanize. There’s no middle way. So; yeah. My opinion is that absolute evil should be fragged with extreme prejudice.”

  This speech left him in an exalted state, trembling with nerves, smiling down at the ISA colonel.

  “You’re a funny guy, aren’t you?” Threadley said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone be so politically incorrect, in so many ways, in so few sentences. I almost want to put you up for some kind of award. Take off your suit. Come with me.”

  Threadley had already taken off his EVA suit. Out of it, he looked like an aging enka singer Kiyoshi had known back home, with a gray ponytail, a beer belly, and skinny shanks. He escorted Kiyoshi to a shipshape office where a screen took up all of one wall. It showed 4 Vesta and the distant dot of the Unicorn.

  Threadley prepared tea. His precise movements—the very fact that he did it himself, instead of letting a bot do it for him—reminded Kiyoshi of the zero-gee variation of the Japanese tea ceremony. You had to have steady hands to squirt the hot water into the cups instead of splattering it all over the room. Threadley corraled the splashback by expertly swirling the cups. These were ceramic with self-lids. The tea was some decaffeinated herbal blend.

  “So,” Threadley said. “You’re a solo operator.”

  Here it was, then. The moment of danger. “Yup. Solo operator.”

  “You ply the unfriendly void in that death-trap of a ship, buying here, selling there, picking up the recycling from rocks too out-of-the-way for the big outfits to bother with. 6 Hebe is your most frequent port of call. When port-side, you pick up girls, browse the simware showrooms, and buy drugs from the freelance chemists who hang out in the bars. Basically, you’re just like ten thousand other no-hopers who think they’re something because they’ve got a ship of their own.”

  Kiyoshi shrugged, not bothering to take offense.

  “A lot of them believe in God, too. If anything, you’re late to the party. It’s a pretty common reaction to isolation, living on the edge, with nothing except a layer of metal and a not-very-bright computer between you and the abyss.”

  He’s just fishing. Kiyoshi sipped his tea.

  “You’ve got family on Ceres. The refugees from 11073 Galapagos. They’re doing OK, we hear. Settling in well … without any help from you. No urge to visit?”

  “Ceres is a long way from here,” Kiyoshi responded.

  “It is. Gotta be lonely, knowing you’re the only Japanese pureblood on this side of the solar system.”

  Like everyone else, Threadley had the wrong end of the stick regarding the Galapajin. Their ethnic heritage had never defined them as much as their Catholic faith did. Or rather, the two things were intertwined, so that slaps at their ethnicity missed the mark. For himself, Kiyoshi had a red line related to both things and neither. He was prepared to take a stand if and when Threadley demanded to scan the Unicorn’s hub. Until then, let the guy aim his darts.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” Threadley said unexpectedly. He snapped his fingers at the door.

  It opened, and Viola Budgett came in.

  ★

  Amid the chaos on board the Húludao, Cydney got a message from Aidan in LA.

  “Well, huh. I would have said that workstation wasn’t fixable. The Chinese; go figure.”

  Cydney had asked the Húludao’s information systems manager, a handsome and friendly man, to repair the astrophysics lab’s workstation. She hadn’t held out much hope, but after a few hours it had been returned to her, as good as new. Handsome had assured her the repair job had been purely mechanical: the Chinese hadn’t read the data. They couldn’t read it with their equipment.


  Copying the workstation’s contents to Aidan for analysis, Cydney had warned him, “Don’t tell anyone it was the Chinese that fixed it. Don’t even mention that we’re on a Chinese ship. I mean it. This is diplomatically sensitive.”

  “Don’t worry, Cyds, I haven’t breathed the C-word,” he reassured her now. “So. The data. I’m kind of puzzled here. We were expecting to find the dirt on the Vesta Conspiracy?”

  That was what people were calling Dr. James’s Secret Project, now revealed to have been VA’s struggle with the Heidegger program.

  “There isn’t anything about it. Zilch. It’s like the U-Vesta astrophysics lab wasn’t even in on the conspiracy. All we got here is a shit-ton of data about asteroids and neutrinos and so on.”

  “Doggone it!” Cydney felt like crying.

  “Well, there’s one thing. Remember the financial records you scraped from the university servers? Suggestive of some kind of scam? We found some more details on that. A spreadsheet authored by Viola Budgett, who I guess was one of Dr. James’s lab assistants.”

  “Yeah,” Cydney said to the air inside her cabin. “That’s right. I saved her, too. And then the ISA came aboard when we got into orbit, and took her off. No one else. Just her.”

  ★

  “You’re him,” Viola Budgett said, when Colonel Threadley introduced them. Kiyoshi had known her the minute she walked into the office. He made a point of doing background on people he was going to be scamming. So he’d known who Viola Budgett was and what she looked like for fourteen months.

  She cringed against the door, staring fearfully at him, as if he were a monster that had crawled out from under her bed.

  “Sit down, Miss Budgett,” Threadley purred. “Have some tea.”

  “It was him. He sold us the thing. He only asked for fifty K, and it was an incredibly interesting object. Unlike any space debris any of us had ever seen. It was unlike, wasn’t it?”

  Budgett started to cry. She sat down and put her face in her hands.

  “When you feel able,” Threadley said tenderly.

  “But—b-but—then he came back and asked for more. He said that on second thoughts, fifty K was too low. He wanted five hundred K. And of course we didn’t have it. But he said if we c-c-couldn’t pay, then he’d just have to go to the m-m-media. B-b-by that time, of course, we knew what it was, what he’d sold us. B-but by then VA had it. So we didn’t have the thing or the money. So that’s why I, I, I … that’s how I came up with the idea.”

  Tears streamed down Budgett’s cheeks. This was not an accusation but a confession.

  “Around that time, an UNVRP team arrived on Vesta. We were going to be collaborating with them, sharing our survey data. You know how UNVRP operates. They buy asteroids that fit their criteria, and if there are people there, they pay them to leave. So I thought, what if we could make sure there are people there … and what if they were our people? And then, what if their compensation from UNVRP, what if some of that could be ours? So that’s how I set it up.”

  Kiyoshi interjected calmly, “Sir, this woman is slandering me. I have no idea what she’s talking about.”

  “You—you liar!”

  “Nice try,” Threadley said. “Your buddy Haddock has already confessed.”

  “Oh yeah, I met him downstairs,” Budgett sniffled. “It was a surprise to see him here. But people like that always get caught sooner or later. Sir, I hope you send him and his gang to Pallas.” Her voice shook with vengefulness.

  Kiyoshi’s whole body prickled with sweat. He couldn’t believe Haddock had confessed. But everybody confessed to the ISA, didn’t they? Everybody.

  “I knew the Haddock gang from when I worked for Kharbage LLC,” Budgett said. “They were the ones who put us in touch with this sleazebucket. It figures, doesn’t it? All the pirates in the system know each other. It’s like this filthy, bottom-feeding subculture.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you speak of your friend like that,” Kiyoshi said. “I’m referring to Alicia Petruzzelli.” He turned to Threadley. “Of course you know that Petruzzelli was part of the operation. She played a logistical role. I assume Budgett cut her in on the profits.”

  Threadley shook his head. More than ever, he looked like that enka singer who’d died on 11073 Galapagos, with a fatherly twinkle in his eye. “Don’t bother. We won’t be going after Kharbage, LLC this time. Adnan Kharbage is too important a player in the recycling arena.”

  “He’s a pirate,” Kiyoshi said, angered at the failure of his ploy to deflect the blame. “I’m not, and neither are Captain Haddock and his family. I resent and absolutely deny the insinuation that I or they would ever steal anything.”

  “That cant of theirs sounds fairly piratical,” Threadley said.

  “It’s a pose. A joke, if you’re familiar with the concept. They’re itinerant construction workers. Way I know them is I used to sell them splart, timber, plasticrete. You know: construction materials.”

  “Ah, yes,” Threadley said. “Timber.”

  He leaned forward. The movement caused him to rise slightly from his ergoform.

  “Timber is an extremely valuable substance out here. Extremely rare. Yet it accounts for half of the purchases made by Loyola Holdings, Inc. You have clients on remote rocks literally growing the stuff for you, Mr. Yonezawa. Hybrid oak and poplar apparently do very well in zero-gee. Funny thing is, we have no record of timber sales by your company.”

  “Some of those sales may have been conducted off the books,” Kiyoshi bluffed.

  Viola Budgett wiped her nose on her sleeve. The movement reminded both men of her presence.

  “Thank you, Ms. Budgett. You’ve been very helpful,” Threadley said.

  She sprang up, but lingered for a moment. “Are you going to send him to Pallas?”

  “Somewhere worse,” Threadley said. “You have my word on that.”

  ★

  Cydney digested Aidan’s analysis. “So the mysterious messages to Gap 2.5,” she said aloud. “Those were just responses to blackmail demands?”

  Based on Viola Budgett’s spreadsheet, that was how it looked. Dr. James had wired money to Kiyoshi Yonezawa from the Vesta Express, when he visited the de Grey Institute in connection with the conspiracy, so that he wouldn’t have to use the university servers. Of course, he hadn’t known Budgett was keeping her own record of the transactions. Nor had he been able to hide the holes in his department’s budget, which Cydney had found at the beginning of this investigative journey.

  It had now ended in anticlimax, for her purposes. Compared to the ravages of the Heidegger program, a blackmail scam wouldn’t even rate a thousand views.

  Aidan also pointed out that some of the signals apparently sent to Gap 2.5 had probably been Adrian Smith swapping movies with his friends on Triton, much further away.

  Disappointed, Cydney nevertheless put together a squib. She speculated that the enigmatic Kiyoshi Yonezawa was some kind of a gangster based in Gap 2.5. She sent it to Aidan to use when they next had a slow moment on the feed.

  ★

  Kiyoshi gazed at the Unicorn on the viewport screen, willing it to vanish. If they arrested him, they’d also confiscate his ship. Go, he thought at Jun. Flee. Save yourself. These were the very words Jun had said to him hours before the destruction of 11073 Galapagos. But this time, the thought was pointless. The Imagine Dragons made the Unicorn look like a pedal glider. If Jun ran, they’d overhaul him in a hot second and probably frag him.

  Which might be preferable to the ISA finding out that the Unicorn was under the control of an illegally empowered MI.

  Threadley startled him by saying, “Don’t worry, you’re not under arrest.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No.”

  “You told Budgett you were going to send me somewhere worse than Pallas.”

  “I am. That place you call home.”

  Kiyoshi laughed. He scratched his cubital port through his sleeve.

  “Seems like headquarters
got a call from your boss,” Threadley said. “Bastard’s got thrust with a capital T. Specifically what was said to whom, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. It would be futile for me to speculate on your worth to the Shogun.”

  The title hung between them, like a bad smell. Kiyoshi was stunned that the boss-man had come through for him, more stunned that the boss possessed the clout to spring him from the clutches of the ISA. He had known that the man called the Shogun had connections. Otherwise, 99984 Ravilious would have been history by now. But he hadn’t known the boss-man had thrust-with-a-capital-T, as Threadley put it,

  “I’d really like to know what you’re doing out there,” Threadley said. “Timber …”

  Kiyoshi did not say a word.

  “You know, I wasn’t kidding, back on the bridge, when I said I’d like to nominate you for some kind of award. You’ve got the right stuff. You were the one who took Shoshanna down after she got infected. You took out a whole roomful of meat puppets. Secured the entity known as Little Sister and held the fort until we arrived. Didn’t even get the post-combat shakes, didja?”

  A smirk fought to emerge on Kiyoshi’s lips. “I had God on my side.”

  “And there I was thinking you had to be on go-juice. Anyway, what I’m getting at is this: you’re the kind of individual the ISA can use. I’m authorized to offer you a generous starting salary.”

  Kiyoshi just managed not to laugh. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m flattered. Sincerely flattered. But all I want is to get back to my ship and go home.”

  ★

  A while later, Cydney, monitoring her own feed, emailed Aidan: “What about my item on Gap 2.5? Might as well use it, after everything I went through to get that workstation.”

  Aidan’s response came twenty-six minutes later. (They were already closer to home.) “What item?”

  “Oh,” Cydney said, putting two and two together. Things did vanish in the ether … if the ISA did not think they should be known. Thoughtfully, she emailed back: “Never mind.”

  xxxxi.

  Elfrida floated out of her telepresence cubicle after nine hours, stiff and tired. She had the worst headache of her life. “Doggone asimov-class phavatar … Medibot!” A dalek-class bot rolled up before she reached the end of the corridor. “I’ve got a headache,” Elfrida said pitifully.