The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy

by Felix R. Savage

  Jun said, “Civilization is like a spaceship. It’s old. It’s got a lot of klicks on the odometer, it’s been taking a lot of damage. It’s embrittled.” He walked backwards in front of Kiyoshi. “We slip up once, we’re finished. This could be that. A spot of labor unrest on the edge of the solar system. A crack in humanity’s collective shield. And what if this is the crack that shatters it into a billion pieces?”

  Kiyoshi snarled soundlessly. He elbowed Jun’s projection out of his way, earning a curse from the man whom he actually bumped into. He walked past Economy Ship Rentals, Uber Galaxy, and GetThereNow (The Most Trusted Ship-Share Club).

  “Where are you going?”

  Kiyoshi did not answer. He left the row of ship rental companies behind and stepped onto one of the moving walkways that curved up the docking bay’s side wall. People pushed past him.

  Jun’s projection reappeared in the standing lane of the walkway. “I thought you were going to rent a ship!”

  ~Yaru yo! [I’ll do it!] Japanese was a great language for evasions.

  The walkway rose through a open pressure gate and dumped Kiyoshi into the Rocking Horse’s interstitial space, between the docking bays and the residential habs up top. Local wits called this ‘N-Space,’ after the extra dimension that scientists imagined to exist between our real ones. Gargantuan struts and atmospheric rebalancing units blocked lines of sight. Around the top of the walkway, tents, shanties, and booths lined haphazard streets, giving the impression of a music festival that had settled in for the long haul.

  Kiyoshi veered into the chaos of N-Space. Rage-rock and emo-clash leaked from poorly sound-baffled pubs. Dazed but happy-looking tourists mingled with the locals. Local fashions tended towards the gothic, so Kiyoshi fit in. He smelled BBQ, marijuana, and freshly baked bread. A girl drifted towards him, smiling, and offered him a coupon for a free hug.

  Not every N-Space resident was a predatory hustler, but those that were had it down to an art. Advertising was illegal in the UN? Fine; talking wasn’t. They brushed past Kiyoshi, smiling, always smiling (some of them had had surgical help with that) and whispered about their services and special bargains. He shook his head: I’m not interested in replacing my eyes with multi-spectrum cameras, thanks. Or increasing my penis size 3 to 5 centimeters. No problem, man. The network absorbed his feedback and looped it back to the sales force. Their pitches shifted in tone. Girls, drugs, boys, prettier girls, stronger drugs … A black-skinned beauty caught his elbow and murmured an offer he could not refuse.

  “You’ve got yourself a customer, honey. How much?”

  Jun’s projection flashed up again, lips moving—his pleas inaudible now; Kiyoshi had turned his cochlear implants down.

  Kiyoshi followed his lovely companion into her tent. Mercury could wait.

  xiv.

  On board the newly renamed Monster, Mendoza, BCI-less, floundered through the news. The more he read and watched, the more he panicked. Events on Mercury were moving fast. The Earth-based feeds framed it as labor unrest, but the ‘disturbance’ following the electoral victory of Angelica Lin was clearly more than that. The feeds were saying that a bunch of phavatars had malfunctioned. Or, Lin herself had weaponized them.

  Only Mendoza knew the truth. Vinge-classes … In real life, they’re bigger.

  He couldn’t find any live feeds from Mercury. Elfrida was still blocking his ID. His calls to other UNVRP employees on Mercury went unanswered. Best case scenario, Star Force was interdicting comms to and from the planet.

  Worst case scenario …

  Thousands of people dead.

  The possibility took on increasing solidity in his mind as minutes stretched into hours, and Kiyoshi Yonezawa still had not come back.

  But his fears turned out to fall far short of the truth.

  In the middle of the night, a renegade feed based on Luna (where else?) broke the news that Mercury owed its troubles to a new iteration of the Heidegger program.

  Mendoza raised his shocked gaze to Fr. Lynch. The Jesuit held up his own tablet, and a babble of voices burst forth: “… the Heidegger program …” “… downloaded from the internet …” “… human error …”

  “Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” said a deeper, authoritative voice from the tablet. “Our preliminary analysis indicates that some disaffected cretin did this on purpose.”

  “Maybe they did,” Mendoza whispered.

  “It would not be at all impossible for a wrongdoer with some knowledge of computing to recompile the Heidegger program from quarantined PLAN spam on unsecure private servers,” the voice opined.

  “They’ve wheeled out the director of the bloody ISA to address public concerns,” Fr. Lynch marvelled. “That bastard never sticks his head up above the parapet. They must be terrified of another system-wide panic.”

  Mendoza shook his head. “They’re just taking the opportunity to scare even more people off the internet. He’s talking crap. No one could recompile the Heidegger program from spam. It’s way too complex. And it’s too big to be disguised as junk mail. When it sent itself out from 4 Vesta, it pretended to be a third-wave poetic syncretic film.” He threw his own tablet across the cabin. “Derek Lorna mentioned a piece of software he’d written! He’s on the team studying the original Heidegger program. He must have smuggled a copy out of the sandbox and—and given it to Angelica Lin … who installed it on the UNVRP supercomputer. That’s how it hijacked the phavatars.”

  “No one could be that evil.”

  “You need to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt, Father.” Hurling the tablet had propelled Mendoza backwards. He twisted in the air and slammed his foot into the viewport screen in the wall. It hurt. Twenty-four hours in zero-gee had helped his feet to heal, but his heels were still tender.

  Originally intended to sleep the dozens-strong crew that had operated the ship in its heyday, this room was ten times the size of what Mendoza thought of as a cabin. Now it was empty of bunks, littered with random floating objects, from sacks of splart to farming implements. The big screen took up the end wall. Mendoza’s foot left a gray bruise of crushed capacitors on it.

  “Hey! Jun!” he shouted. “Thing! AI! Where are you?”

  The door opened and Jun Yonezawa walked in. Mendoza’s hackles rose, although he knew the figure was a projection, and the AI had opened the door remotely. The projection wore a somber expression and a black habit over EVA boots. Fr. Lynch smiled.

  “Kiyoshi’s not picking up,” the monkish little figure said. “I don’t know what’s happened to him.”

  On the screen, the optical feed zoomed in, zipping past spaceships in parking orbits, until the underside of the Rocking Horse filled the screen. Puffs of water vapor escaped into space from the convolutions of the giant space station’s solar-powered steam generator.

  “We can’t wait for him any longer,” the projection said. A volley of hollow thumps shivered through the Monster. “So we’re going to Plan B.”

  “Which is?” Fr. Lynch said.

  “I’m having some work done,” Jun said. “Something we’ve been meaning to get around to for a while.”

  The optical feed flickered and whirled. Electric-blue cutter laser beams sliced across the blackness. Another impact struck the ship. Fr. Lynch said with an anxious laugh, “That sounds like quite a lot of work.”

  Jun nodded. “I’ll show you what they’re doing.”

  The feed steadied on a view from the front of the ship, all the way down its 350-meter length. The Monster was shaped like a skewer with three potatoes impaled on it, separated by swastikas of high-emissivity radiator panels. The largest ‘potato,’ the furthest forward, was the giant cargo module that had once carried hundreds of Japanese Catholics to a remote asteroid called 11073 Galapagos. Beyond that, half-hidden by the cargo module in this view, was the much smaller operations module, where they were now. And beyond that, a very misshapen potato indeed, was the drive. Almost as big as the cargo module, its flared radiation shie
ld hid a 50m-diameter tokamak where deuterium fused with deuterium to generate a little bit of thrust and a lot of nasty neutrons. D-D fusion had dropped off the technology menu generations ago.

  People in mobility-enabled EVA suits fussed around the drive shield. Self-propelled drones were hauling something large away from the ship.

  “I’m having the drive replaced,” Jun said.

  Mendoza stared. “I thought you said that would cost something unreal?”

  “Nine point five million spiders,” Jun confirmed.

  “Are you robbing banks for the boss-man now, Jun?” Fr. Lynch said.

  “Not yet.”

  Fr. Lynch did not smile. “Then where did you find that kind of money?”

  “I sold something,” Jun said.

  ★

  Kiyoshi returned to the docking bay with a spring in his step. A citrusy aroma clung around him. He felt like he’d begun to adjust to the gravity. His mood was greatly improved.

  That changed when he saw a stranger on the Superlifter’s steps, trying to open the airlock.

  “Hey!”

  Another person stood on a ladder, painting over the sheet of insulation foil Kiyoshi had splarted onto the Superlifter’s nose.

  “What are you doing?”

  Both strangers looked down at him. The one on the steps was a long-haired youth with a guitar slung on his back. On the ladder stood a girl with four arms. Each of her four hands held a canister of spray paint. They looked like typical Midway denizens: beautiful, louche, and clueless.

  “You know how to get into this type of truck?” Guitar Boy said hopefully. “It wants me to input the combination to reset the iris scanner, but I can’t input the combination without validating my ID with the iris scanner. It’s fucked, man.”

  “It’s called double-locking your stuff,” Kiyoshi said.

  “You from the dealership?” the girl said.

  “No.”

  “Those skunks,” Guitar Boy said. “Guess we should have known better than to buy a fifth-hand ship from a guy in a helicopter beanie. But the price was right. Fuck.” He sat down on the top step.

  Kiyoshi decided to play this cool. He started up the steps. The girl watched him warily. “When the price is right, something else is usually wrong,” he offered. “How much did they take you for?”

  “Eleven million.”

  “Shit!” The Superlifter was worth half that much again. “Where’d kids like you find that many zeroes?”

  “Ha!” said the girl on the ladder. “He doesn’t recognize us!”

  “Should I?” Kiyoshi was almost at the top of the steps now. He was pinging Jun, and not getting any answer.

  “Brainrape,” Guitar Boy said,

  “What?”

  “Brainrape!” the girl said. “Duh!” With her upper left arm, she indicated the artwork she had roughed out on the Superlifter’s nose. It seemed to depict a phallus thrusting into a screaming man’s opened brainpan.

  “That’s us,” Guitar Boy confirmed. “Well, actually this is only half of us. Dave and Jim went to pick up our stabilizer braces. They say you need them in zero-gee, or you’ll flab out.” He gazed doubtfully at Kiyoshi’s stork-thin physique. “Anyway, we’re pretty big in the Belt …”

  “We’re huge in the Belt,” the girl interjected. “Eighty thousand tracks downloaded on Ceres, last month alone!”

  “Yeah, so we’re going on tour. So that’s why we bought this crappy ship, which we can’t even get into. The dealership isn’t answering my pings. Dude just took our money and flew away on his stupid fucking beanie-mounted helicopter.” Guitar Boy’s mouth twitched into a smile, which immediately faded. “This shit on Mercury, and now this,” he sighed, equating his personal inconvenience with the violence that had engulfed a planet.

  “I might be able to help,” Kiyoshi said. “I’ve piloted a Superlifter myself in the past. Pilots tend to be paranoid, y’know? Hence the double-locking protocol.” He knew that if Guitar Boy had already tried and failed several times to open the airlock, it would now be in lockdown mode. Even Kiyoshi wouldn’t be able to open it the regular way. “’Scuse me …”

  He knelt on the top step and reached under it.

  “Aha,” he said, holding up a slim strip of metal. “Spare key. These idiots always hide them in the same place.”

  “Great!” Guitar Boy grinned. “You frug, man!”

  Kiyoshi saw two more youths, presumably the other half of Brainrape, approaching the ‘Lifter’s parking space, carrying piles of stabilizer braces with pizza boxes balanced on top.

  “By the way,” he said, easing past Guitar Boy. “Which of you guys is the pilot?”

  “None of us, man. Helicopter Beanie said a pilot comes with the ship. Like, not a real pilot, but an MI, y’know? They can do everything these days. You just have to sit and watch over them.”

  If Brainrape had succeeded in getting into the Wakizashi, they would have found that its MI was not the usual autistic, super-competent calculating machine. They would have met a thing that lived in a fridge and wanted to eat them alive. Kiyoshi wondered what the hell Jun had been thinking, to let the Ghost slip through his fingers. He wondered if Jun was responsible for this mess at all. He wanted to believe not.

  “Let me ask you—sorry, what’s your name?” he said, wiggling the key in the hidden slot beneath the iris scanner.

  “Charles. Charles Richard Brentner.”

  “Charles, would you let an MI play your instruments on stage, while you sat back and watched?”

  “Naw, man! What kind of a show would that be?”

  “Well, that’s how pilots feel about flying their ships.” The key clicked home, resetting the iris scanner and keypad. Kiyoshi positioned his eyes in front of the scanner while keying in the combination: A-L-I-C-I-A, a sentimental reference no one else would ever get. The lock valved. Familiar, fetid air washed out. Kiyoshi stepped into the darkness. “This is my ship, as it happens. And I’m leaving. So I advise you to clear the area.”

  He logged in. To his relief, the hub recognized him. The lights came on, the virtual command lever array leapt into existence, and Kiyoshi tripped over the sushi machine he’d bought on Luna. He couldn’t get used to everything being on the floor.

  “Hey!” Guitar Boy yelled, stumbling into the cockpit. ”What are you doing? We paid for this ship, you wanna see the receipt?”

  When a Superlifter was in its horizontal position, the crew couches flattened out to vertical, so they stood flush with the rear wall of the cockpit. Kiyoshi reached behind the pilot’s couch for his HabSafe™ laser rifle. It was specially designed to go through people, not walls. However, its main function was as a terrifier. Guitar Boy backed away from the red targeting beam that sprang from the rifle’s evil-looking muzzle.

  “That’s right. GTFO.” Kiyoshi gesture-commanded the hub to initiate a launching sequence.

  “Charles!” The girl sprang into the airlock, wrapped all four arms around her bandmate and dragged him backwards. Kiyoshi heard the sound of what he hoped was an expensive guitar smashing on the floor of the docking bay.

  “Frug on, guys,” he murmured, and closed the airlock, but not before the sound of a klaxon penetrated the cockpit.

  Without the Ghost enabled, the hub of the Wakizashi was extremely dumb. It had been made to cede most of its functionality to the thing in the fridge. What remained was not sufficiently aware to know that it was inside a docking bay. It began to spin up its He3-D fusion drive, which was small, but powerful enough to roast everyone in the docking bay, and possibly ignite the atmosphere of the Rocking Horse.

  “Not yet! Stop!” Kiyoshi manually paused the countdown. He hadn’t realized quite how dumb this thing had become. He would have to do it all himself. Fine. He preferred it that way.

  Standing with his back to the pilot’s couch, he gripped the twin virtual joysticks that stuck out of the couch between his legs. His BCI provided the illusory feeling of metal knobs digging into his palms.
>
  If the Wakizashi had been sold out from under him, he was no longer the registered owner of the ship, and the Rocking Horse authorities wouldn’t allow him to take it out of the dock. So, he’d just have to scare them into letting him go.

  He extended the Superlifter’s twin robot arms, normally used for handling cargo, and ground their claw-like ends into the floor of the docking bay. Pulled back.

  The jackstands buckled.

  The Superlifter’s rear end dropped. The edge of the drive shield crunched into the floor.

  Like a 250-ton hermit crab, rucking up the antistatic floor coating, the Superlifter dragged itself towards the nearest airlock.

  People screamed and ran out of the way. On his optical feed, Kiyoshi saw the members of Brainrape standing in the parking space he’d just vacated. A two-meter humanoid with a bug’s head was talking to Guitar Boy … who was now No-Guitar Boy. Kiyoshi grinned. But the security phavatar worried him. If they didn’t want to let him go, all they’d have to do was not let him out.

  He fastened his straps with one hand and his teeth. The airlock loomed, a chrome anus as big as a cathedral.

  “Hey, you in the Superlifter! Cease maneuvering immediately!”

  A security phavatar’s head floated in front of him, its bug-eyes glowing UN blue, menacing. Kiyoshi waved a dismissive hand, which had zero effect. They owned this space. As long as he was logged into their network, they could show him whatever they wanted.

  “Estimated damages to Rocking Horse infrastructure: 40,00 spiders … 42,000 spiders …” This floating head was a bewigged lawyer. “45,000 spiders …”

  The floating faces multiplied, until he seemed to be sharing the cockpit with dozens of severed heads, all talking over each other.

  “I thought you left with the Monster?” The shaven-headed girl from Traffic Control blinked at him in puzzlement.

  “Where’d the Monster go?” Kiyoshi asked before he could stop himself.

  “Dunno. All I know is you paid for a week’s parking and didn’t even stay the night.”