As if the statue were a giant teddy-bear, she lay down beside 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 them.
John Mendoza.
Elfrida knelt up, heartbeat racing. How could it be Mendoza who’d built these things?
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 imagery that she associated 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 at her, and laughed.
Spurred to rage, Elfrida enabled the edit function of the sim. She’d never bothered to use it before. As she sang, she painted her words in gold on the sky, with cherubs from her Unicorn Tears® contacts for decoration.
“Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that something something dee dum dum dum. 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. She was no longer writing, just coloring all over everything.
“Rejoice, rejoice, the something something um, shall come to thee, oh Israel!”
Dots appeared in the scribbled-over sky. Elfrida stopped singing and stared up in bewilderment.
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. Then the paratrooper avatars 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 that bore a rampant lion holding a shepherd’s staff.
“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. Even though it was just a sim, Elfrida threw herself flat.
Raising her face a centimeter off the ground, she wrote in the sand: AM HERE 79° N, 50° W PLEASE HELP
After a time, the crashing and yelling from the foot of the scarp stopped. 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. The sim prevented her from going through him. She had no sensory feedback. “Are you really there?”
“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 its shape was that 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 Elfrida hadn’t known he was anywhere near Mercury.
“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.
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, and Jun Yonezawa was controlling them. Elfrida still got a shock when a vinge-class head poked down into the crevice. 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 unrolled, spilling her into the chamber.
“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 human. “I guess you would have to be here, too.”
“You sound less than thrilled. I’ll blame it on heat exhaustion.”
&
nbsp; “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,” Kiyoshi said. “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. 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. An EVA-suited figure emerged into the sunlight. This was Kiyoshi Yonezawa. Spaceborn-lanky and agile, he had a cable around his waist. Mendoza was belaying him from inside the airlock chamber.
Kiyoshi juggled 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, and blew up a bunch of washing-machines.
He cursed. 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.
★
The Superlifter took off.
The three 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.
xlvi.
Elfrida and Mendoza came out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral with the rest of the 6 o’clock Mass crowd, onto a 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. Maybe one day it would start to make sense to her.
Mendoza caught up with 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 didn’t actually float in the air, of course, but balanced on spindly stilts. People had gone kind of nuts with splart when it was first invented. 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 had one thing going for it—an amazing view.
From the edge of the plaza, Elfrida could see all 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 throbbing like a giant heartbeat.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” Mendoza said.
“Yeah, with Cydney. But we just futzed around in SoHo.”
“Have you been in touch with her?”
“John, she says she’s staying.”
“Staying? On Mercury?”
Elfrida nodded. “You know, it looks like Wrightstuff, Inc., is going to end up getting what they wanted all along.”
“Sovereignty.”
“The Republic of Mercury,” Elfrida said acidly. “Of course, they’ll have to share the He3 under a UN-mediated agreement. And the health inspectors will probably insist on some big changes in their lifestyle. Not least, an end to their cloning program. But Grumpy Doug—whoops, I forgot, he’s changed his name; George—is cool with that. He’s also planning to resurrect President Doug’s parraterraforming project. He thinks the private sector is getting the message that there’s more money to be made from putting people in space, than from taking resources out of space, although the two things aren’t incompatible, of course.” She sighed. “Oh, and did I mention? He’s adopted Jake Vlajkovic-Gates and his baby sister. Also, Wrightstuff, Inc. took in all the survivors from UNVRP HQ. I would have thought most of them would want to leave the planet. But they’re staying. I guess it really is their home.”
“But what about Cydney?”
“Oh.” Elfrida grimaced. “She’s shutting down her feed. You know, her father’s a politican. He basically runs Xhosaland. So she’s joining the family business, and they’re setting up a joint venture with the Dougs.”
“What kind of a joint venture?”
“Tourism.”
Mendoza laughed. Elfrida smiled and shrugged. Breaking up with Cydney hadn’t been as hard as she would have expected. Their relationship had been a casualty of the Mercury Rebellion, as people were now calling it.
The story had been framed to minimize political blowback. And Cydney had played a key role in the media narrative that cast Mike Vlajkovic as the arch-villain of the piece. Angelica Lin had not earned the post-humous opprobrium that dos Santos had predicted for her. In fact, she’d been reduced to a tragic footnote. The only victim that people really cared about was Zazoë Heap.
“I bet Cydney was paid off by someone,” Mendoza said. “The UN probably has an entire agency for that kind of thing. Carpets, Sweeping Under, Department Of.”
“Don’t talk about carpets,” Elfrida said sadly.
Seagulls whirled past the plaza, screeching. Down on the Hudson River, the wind tore at the furled sails of fishing boats returning to harbor under electric power.
“And the Venus Project? Is it really dead?” Mendoza said.
“Yes,” Elfrida said. “This was one disaster too many. Oh, Vesta will hit Venus eighteen years from now, as scheduled. A big-ass period on the end of humanity’s terraforming dream.”
She played an imaginary violin, mocking the dream she had cared so passionately about herself. But Mendoza saw through her bravado, and slipped his arm around her shoulders. Her eyes watered. Pretending it was the wind, she pulled away and headed for the coffee stall on the other side of the plaza.
“Good idea,” Mendoza said, following her. “Mine’s a latte …”
“With goat’s milk and an extra shot. I remember.” She ordered coffees for them both. “My crystal ball tells me that paraterraforming is the future. I guess it makes sense. It certainly makes business sense, according to Cydney.”
“Yup,” Mendoza said. “It’s all about the money.”
A smiling young barista handed them their coffees in St. Patrick’s souvenir travel mugs.
“You’re telling me,” Elfrida groused. “These coffees cost the equivalent of a day’s furlough pay.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t be stupid. Now that I’m living at home, I don’t need to economize.” Elfrida sipped her cappuccino. “Yum; this is good coffee, though. Almost as good as Dr. Seth’s.”
Mendoza went quiet again. He’d been doing that a lot on this trip, and every time, Elfrida tensed up, dreading what he might be going to tell her.
But he’d already confirmed what she dreaded most of all, and maybe there was nothing else coming.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy Page 93
