He said reflectively, “It’s not all about the money. I shouldn’t have said that. There are good people in the UN, people genuinely committed to truth and justice. The fact that Derek Lorna’s going on trial proves it.”
“Going on trial doesn’t mean going to jail.”
Mendoza squeezed her arm. “That part’s up to you.”
Derek Lorna had created the Heidegger program, version 2.0, and unleashed it on Mercury. Elfrida knew it. Mendoza also knew it, but he couldn’t prove it. The Interplanetary Court of Justice’s case against Lorna rested on the souvenir Elfrida had brought back from Mercury: the head of Gloria dos Santos.
UN techies had cut dos Santos’s BCI out of her skull. Call records and other data stored in the device’s memory crystals yielded evidence that Lorna had knowingly supplied UNVRP with software upgrades that were, to put it mildly, defective. It was basically a product liability claim. But Elfrida would be giving evidence at the trial, and she was determined to tell the court everything she knew.
“I’m going to tell the truth,” she said. “I’m going to tell them it wasn’t defective software. It was designed to do exactly what it did, which was murder people. If that spoils everyone’s tidy little narrative, too freaking bad. Lorna is not going to walk away from this with a fine.”
Hot coffee splashed her fingers. She had gestured dramatically with her mug, forgetting it was not a pouch. Now the mug was empty, her coffee all over her jeans.
Mendoza picked up the mug lid and apologized to people nearby. “I have faith in you.”
“I wish I had faith in me.” Her teeth were chattering. “I’m afraid I’m going to mess up and he’ll get off.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“It sucks that I have to stay on Earth until the trial is over.”
“Life at Hotel Mom And Dad isn’t that bad, is it?”
“Things are kind of sticky right now.”
Elfrida’s impassioned email from Mercury had caused a lot of trouble for her mother. Add in the domestic tension from the revelation of Ingrid Haller’s double life, and the Goto household was not exactly a haven of peace at the moment.
“Well, you don’t have to stay in Rome,” Mendoza said. “You could explore Earth, for a change. I went on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Fallujah recently. It’s incredible. The shrine’s in the middle of the jungle.”
“John, why do you have to leave?” She hadn’t meant to say that. The words were torn from her as if someone had reached down her throat and pulled them out.
Mendoza walked away from her and stopped beside one of the telescopes overlooking Central Lagoon. She followed him.
“I just have to,” he said in a voice so low she could hardly hear him.
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because Jun asked you to?”
Jun hadn’t asked her to come. That still stung. Yes, she understood that she had to stay on Earth for Derek Lorna’s trial. But all the same …
The Yonezawa brothers had dropped her and Mendoza off at Midway. From that moment on, Elfrida had understood that Mendoza would be joining the Yonezawas again soon. Somewhere. In space.
She winced at the memory of that last night on Midway. Beautiful chaos in the docking bay. Black tech dealers wandering from ship to ship. Kiyoshi twanging on an acoustic guitar, sitting on the steps of the Chimera’s passenger module, sucking sore fingers. The smell of Russo-Chinese noodle soup. She’d gone on her knees to Jun, or rather, in him—his physical body was a spaceship. Take me with you, she’d pleaded.
But he’d said no.
“You know what he is, don’t you?” she said to Mendoza now.
Mendoza nodded.
“He’s an AI.”
“An ASI,” Mendoza said, barely moving his lips. “He’s still improving himself. He himself admitted that he probably qualifies as a super-intelligence now. Big surprise. He defeated the Heidegger program, version 2.0. Do you know … no I guess you have to be an IT guy to appreciate what an incredible feat of computing that was.”
“As super-intelligences go, it was a newborn baby,” she pointed out. “Trapped in a suitcase.”
“Yeah, but still. He fought it on its own turf, and kicked its ass. To us, it looked like five seconds of cheesy special effects. But in supercomputer time, that’s the equivalent of thousands of years of warfare by attrition, cunning, and logic. He let me have a look at some of his data logs from the fight …” Mendoza shook his head in admiration.
She understood then. What drew Mendoza into space was the same thing that had drawn her, again and again.
Abenteuerlust. The thirst for adventure.
“Well, I guess you have to go,” she said. There was nothing else to say. “Where are you meeting them?”
He shrugged. “In the Belt.”
“OK.”
“They need a data analyst,” he muttered.
“Stop justifying it,” she said, punching him on the arm and smiling. That smile cost her more than he would ever know.
He smiled back gratefully. Offered her the telescope. “Look, you can see our hotel.”
Elfrida peered through the viewfinder. Tourists mooched around on the deck of the Plaza Hotel, a five-storey barge permanently moored at the Columbus Circle dock. “Looks like cocktail hour has started. Shall we head back?”
“Yeah, let’s.”
They joined the queue for the elevator that would take them down to water level. A slim humanoid figure, bundled in a pycnofiber jacket, came to join them. “Where are we going now?”
Elfrida rolled her eyes. “Hello, Louise. We are going back to our hotel.”
“You seem upset,” Louise 361AX said.
As a key witness in UN vs. Derek Lorna, Elfrida was subject to as many restrictions as if she were a criminal herself. She’d only received permission from the court for this trip by agreeing to let her therapist come along as a chaperone.
“I am not upset,” she gritted. “Got it?”
The robot therapist blinked rapidly. No doubt, she had orders to winkle out of Elfrida any information she could. But she also had patient-management functionality that enabled her to detect when Elfrida was in a bad mood. So now, instead of asking questions, she gestured in the direction of the Statue of Liberty. “This really is a beautiful view.”
“Louise, you’re a robot. What would you know about beautiful views?” Elfrida started. Mendoza put a hand on her arm.
“Mahal,” he said, a Filipino endearment.
Elfrida tensed. Then sighed. “OK. You know what, you’re right. It is a beautiful view.”
A view of Earth. The planet that had always been, and would now again be, her home.
TURN THE PAGE!
THE STORY CONTINUES IN
THE LUNA DECEPTION
THE LUNA DECEPTION
SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES BOOK 4
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Copyright © 2019 by Felix R. Savage
Version 2.0
The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.
First published in the United States of America in 2015 by Knights Hill Publishing.
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Author’s Note: This story starts on the same day as The Mercury Rebellion, the previous book in the Sol System Renegades series.
i.
Leaning on his maneuvering jets, the squadron leader jinked into a gap in the enemy’s offensive formation that did not exist—yet—but would in 2.1 seconds. The flash of a nuke lit up the cockpit of his Fragger, dimming his readouts. Gamma radiation washed over the ship, along with a burst of neutrons lethal enough to mangle human tissue at the cellular level. The enemy wasn’t holding back.
Neither was Frank Hope.
“On my go, rele
ase the nail bombs. And go!”
From the ordnance portals of all three surviving Fraggers, the volume-denial warheads leapt into the darkness. Guided by IR-tracking, they shot towards the enemy fighters closing in on the squadron in three dimensions. None of them reached their targets. The enemy’s kinetic cannon batted them aside. But the nail bombs exploded on impact, spraying shrapnel across a volume of several thousand cubic kilometers. Each ‘nail’ was a mini-bomb, filled with combustible foil that would eat steel like a space-age version of naptha.
Whoops erupted on the comms channel when two enemy fighters slowed down, drifting as if stunned. Worms of fire crawled over their hulls.
That only left eighteen, that the squadron could see.
The PLAN’s fighters, dubbed ‘toilet rolls’ for their cylindrical fuselages, possessed a stealth technology unmatched by humanity, which allowed them to go undetected until the moment they pounced on you and nuked your ass. Even during combat, they eluded detection. They showed up as ghosts on your radar, transient flashes of heat that should not have been able to go that fast.
Stealth overturned the basic fact about space combat—its predictability. Like chess, normal space combat was governed by rules: Newtonian physics and ship specs. A sufficiently powerful computer could predict the outcome of any given engagement before it happened. Stealth removed those assurances. It restored raw intuition to its throne.
Once again, you had to be a pilot.
You had to really know how to fly.
And it sucked balls to be stuck 2.1 seconds behind the action, forced to guess that much harder.
Frank pivoted on his thrusters and flew backwards through the fringe of the shrapnel field, slashing a path for himself with the hot plasma of his own deceleration burn. The other two followed. “That’s bought us some time,” Abdul gasped cheerfully.
The nearest toilet rolls would have to change course before they could pursue the Fraggers, and the ones already pursuing them would now have to detour around the shrapnel field.
We might just make it.
At that very minute, a startled gasp forewarned him of tragedy. Abdul’s fighter blossomed into a fireball.
“They’re still throwing slugs at us,” Vicky said. “Must’ve got him smack dab in the VASIMR.”
It was just the two of them now. “Hold your course! We’re almost there.”
Mars.
Nightside speckled with ruddy alien light, it floated in the middle of Frank’s optical feed. The PLAN—an unholy hybrid intelligence descended from rogue AIs and a lost Chinese space fleet—had conquered Mars back in the 22nd century. Humanity had gone through all the stages of grief since then: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and full-frontal assaults. All had proved futile.
You couldn’t bargain with an AI.
Couldn’t beat it in battle, either.
Thousands of Star Force pilots had died, over the decades, in this very volume, sacrificed to non-strategies driven by PR needs rather than military realities.
Now, finally, humanity (or at least a tiny portion of it) was getting smart.
Frank poured on the acceleration. Thrust gees immobilized him in his flight couch. All he could move was his eyes.
Black dots glided across the face of Mars. They weren’t enemy ships. They were much bigger than that.
“Vicky?”
“Yeah?”
“Next up, the orbital fortresses. We’ve shaken off those toilet rolls, but—”
Her scream cut across his words. Slewing his gaze to his IR feed, he saw her Fragger expanding into a dandelion puff of debris.
“Vicky!”
Silence.
Guess we didn’t shake them off, after all.
Tears painted his temples. But it didn’t matter. They’d all known, setting out, that only one of them had to get through.
Grunting, because he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs to scream his rage and hate, he hurtled across the void. There was a way through the lethal cloud of fortresses surrounding Mars. En route to this rendezvous with doom, he’d analyzed their orbits and found several holes in their coverage where a Fragger might slip through.
A Fragger.
Not a Star Force ship.
He’d flown for Star Force when he was a kid. What a clusterfuck. Thirty-year-old hardware running twenty-year-old software, operated by mouth-breathing eighteen-year-old gamers.
The Fragger represented a new paradigm. Sure, its VASIMR engine was less powerful than a standard fusion drive, but it was also lighter. And with that much less mass to push around, you could afford other new-tech features.
The orbital fortresses loomed like tiny, irregularly shaped black moons. Effortfully, Frank moved his left hand to the button on the arm of his couch that would launch the payload.
The reason he was here.
The reason seven other Fraggers had already gone up in dust.
Dust.
Ha, ha.
The orbital fortresses continued their inertial dance. They hadn’t seen him. But a PLAN picket had. A dozen toilet rolls popped out of stealth mode and slagged his ship. In the split second before the Fragger disintegrated, he pushed the launch button.
“Fuck! Fuck fuck FUCK!”
“Cool it,” Vicky said, helping him off with his headset, gloves, and all the other feedback devices that had enabled him to feel as if he really were present in the Fragger’s cockpit.
The other Fragger pilots stood around their telepresence room on Luna, vaping cigarettes, reviewing holographic reconstructions of the battles they’d lost.
“I might have launched my payload in time,” Frank said. ”I got close enough.” But he knew he hadn’t. His payload had been fragged along with his ship. “I was just trying to get a bit closer. Dammit!”
“Well, I launched mine,” Vicky said. “I know. 8,000 klicks out. What are the odds?”
“Non-zero. Good work, Vicks.” He pulled her in for a kiss.
His gaze fell on a screen behind her. It was a realtime view of Mars, a feed from the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point, which was as close as the PLAN would allow human facilities to exist. The Red Planet hung in the blackness of space, impervious to the dogfight that had just added S500 million worth of junk to its orbital retinue.
“It was the delay,” he said.
They cavilled, but they knew he was right. How could you hope to elude the toilet rolls, when you were 2.1 light-seconds from the action?
“This isn’t going to work.”
“It worked better when we just shot the payloads in on inertial trajectories,” Abdul said bleakly.
“Sure, we got close that way. But we never got down to the surface. We have to get the Dust down to the surface. And there’s only one way to do it.” He watched their faces, seeking understanding and acceptance. “Next time, we’ll have to go ourselves.”
ii.
In a slum near the south pole of the Moon, John Mendoza woke to the Te Deum of Bruckner and dressed for work. He pulled his trousers on, the suspenders already buttoned onto the waistband in back. At the same time, with one foot, he hit the ‘Print Last’ button on the 3D printer under his bunk, which spat out a new detachable collar made of recycled plastic. Mendoza jerked yesterday’s shirt off its hanger, buttoned on the new collar, wriggled into the whole assemblage, fastened his suspenders with one hand, and scrubbed a depilatory wipe over his jaw. He did all this while lying on his back. This was the only posture possible in the narrow confines of his capsule, which was ridiculously called a ‘studio apartment.’
Lace up the boots, clap the derby on head, done. The compleat Victorian gentleman, circa 2288.
He collected his walking-stick, opened the door, and sailed down the zipshaft.
Out on the street, it was just as stuffy, but at least you could walk upright. Nightingale Village consisted of one very steep, poorly lit street lined with pubs, payday loan merchants, immersion cafés, and pawnshops. Twisting alleys led to thousands of apartments like Men
doza’s, most of them accessible only by ladder. His was one of the better ones.
He joined the tightly packed throng waiting for the funicular. Someone’s hair tickled his face. The funicular came. They shuffled on board. The string of cable-cars travelled slowly down the dark side of Malapert Mountain.
Outside—and on the heads-up screens in each carriage—a stunning panorama unfolded. Flanked by ramparts of life-support infrastructure, the domes of Shackleton City spilled luminescence into the lunar night. The city sprawled across a plateau fifty kilometers long by ten wide. It straggled up the boundary slopes of Malapert Mountain to the north, Shackleton Crater to the south, Haworth Crater to the northwest, and Shoemaker Crater to the east. All three craters held still-productive water mines. He3 fusion reactors pumped out electricity, and big-box farms supplied food for the city’s population of seven million. The residential domes appeared mottled green from above, an effect of the rich verdure lining their streets. Beneath the glass of the largest domes of all moved the stately silhouettes of airships. The ocean-wrapped sphere of Earth floated in the sky.
Mendoza ignored the view. After all, he saw it every day. He was listening to the second section of the Bruckner and catching up with the news.
His BCI (Brain-Computer Interface), plus retinal implants, enabled him to scan massive amounts of information very fast, running secondary searches on anything intriguing.
A headline from Earth caught his eye.
Charles K. Pope, director of the United Nations Venus Remediation Project, is dead at 48.
“Susmaryosep!” Mendoza breathed. He assigned a squad of virtual searchbots to the topic.
★
The funicular terminated at Huxley dome, where Mendoza transferred to the commuter rail. By this time, he knew everything that everyone else knew about the death of Charles K. Pope.
Guy had gone windsurfing in bad weather. Drowned.
His work pals were emailing back and forth about it. He even exchanged a line or two with Elfrida Goto, far away on Earth.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy Page 94
