“Take the Blessed Sacrament, too,” Jun texted Mendoza.
“WHY?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“No. You lied to get me here. I refuse to be lied to anymore.” When necessary, Mendoza could be as stubborn as an AI. “I’m not your phavatar, Jun. I’m not just a convenient pair of hands. I want to know—”
“I’m hijacking Tiangong Erhao.”
That silenced Mendoza.
“I’m going to fly it to Mars and put on a heroic display of defiance. The Eighth Fleet is coming, too. That ought to bring the Chinese into the war on our side, if only to save face. Humanity hasn’t a chance of winning unless we’re truly united. This just might do it.”
Mendoza smiled.
“But there’s a complication. Some scientists here were running an experiment in human genetic engineering. The scientists were evacuated, but their experimental subjects are still here, and I can’t think of any way to return them to Earth. The journey would kill them, anyway. So …”
“That’s why we had to bring the Blessed Sacrament,” Mendoza realized.
“Yes. And that’s why I had to bring you. You are a deacon, after all.”
Mendoza took a deep breath, and nodded. It was time for him to rise to his responsibilities. He pushed off and flew to the tabernacle Jun had built high on the concave wall of the bridge, above the throne Kiyoshi had installed at the captain’s workstation. The tabernacle had a solid steel door, engraved with the Archangel Michael slaying unclean spirits. Mendoza genuflected in the air. He took out the pyx that held the Host, and the stoppered chalice that held the Precious Blood. He looked around for something to carry them in.
Prince Jian Er was still yelling at Jun. Before Mendoza could react, the prince threw a punch at the projection.
His fist went straight through it. His momentum carried him across the bridge.
Seeming not to comprehend what had happened, the prince kicked off from the far wall and hurled himself at the projection again.
At the same time, driven by an unthinking instinct, Mendoza floated down to get between Jun and Jian Er.
The prince crashed into him.
The chalice flew out of Mendoza’s grip.
It curved through the air and hit the back of Kiyoshi’s throne.
It did not break.
The stopper came out.
As Mendoza watched in transfixed horror, the Precious Blood splashed into the air. The breeze from the vents caught it, breaking large globules into smaller ones. The dark red spray fell on the consoles and screens of the captain’s workstation.
Jian Er seized a handful of Mendoza’s EVA suit, punched him in the face, and screamed in English, “You will die for this!”
Pain radiated through Mendoza’s cheek and jaw. He kicked Jian Er away and dived after the Precious Blood.
Mop it up before it goes into the vents—
But it wasn’t going into the vents. Not with cool air blowing out of them. The drops had already started to vanish into the cracks and gaps in the turn-of-the-century wood-veneered workstation.
Mendoza started to wipe the consoles with the sleeve of his suit. He could wash it later, drink the water, like Father Lynch had said—
“Leave it!” Jun’s projection shouted. The shout came from all the bridge speakers at once. The Chinese gasped. Abandoning his pretense of being human, Jun arrowed through them and materialized between Mendoza and the workstation. “Leave it!”
“It’s going into the cracks, Jun! There’re unprotected circuits down there! Legacy stuff. You’ll get short-outs, rust—”
“Leave it,” Jun whispered.
The look in Jun’s eyes hit Mendoza like a two-by-four. He’d never thought about the fact that Jun had not taken Communion since he died. Mendoza had been away from the Church himself for a while, so he knew what that felt like. He knew how spiritually parched you got. You’d do anything to get back with God.
“OK,” he muttered. “OK, Jun.”
“Is there any left?”
Without being aware of it, Mendoza had caught and re-stoppered the chalice. He peered inside. “A little.”
“Good. Then just take that.”
With misgivings, Mendoza turned his back on the workstation. Jun’s projection sat on Kiyoshi’s throne, arms wrapped around his shins, head on his knees. Mendoza floated in front of him, pistol in hand, keeping the Chinese away, until all the Precious Blood had seeped through the cracks and vanished.
There were a few drops left on the screens. Mendoza bent his head and licked them up, tasting dust.
After that, he said to Bao Gu, “I’m going back in. Wait for me, I guess.”
“Do we have any choice?”
“No,” Mendoza said.
Jun’s projection had already vanished.
As Mendoza left, the R&H bots arrived to escort the Chinese off the bridge.
On his way to the airlock, Mendoza found a rucksack the Galapajin had left behind. He stored the Blessed Sacrament—what was left of it—carefully inside.
Then he went back to Tiangong Erhao.
★
“You came back,” Derek Lorna said.
Lorna was sitting on a promontory of machinery at the bottom of the Imperial Bay, wearing the imperial-red spacesuit he’d stolen from the prince’s yacht. It was a much better one than Mendoza’s, which had been bought third-hand from a bankrupt mining company.
“Yeah,” Mendoza said. “I came back. But not for you, dude. I have to plug these fridges in.”
He jerked on the tether connecting his string of fridges.
“Sabotage?” Lorna guessed.
He was like that. It had taken him five seconds to reach the conclusion that Mendoza had had to have spelled out for him. Then again, Lorna wasn’t encumbered with a sense of right and wrong.
“Creative engineering,” Mendoza answered. He blinked up the map Jun had given him. It showed views of Tiangong Erhao in cross-section and elevation. The sheer scale of the place blew his mind.
“If there are viruses in those babies, you’ll have to physically install them in each sub-network,” Lorna said.
“Yeah, that’s what Jun said.”
“It would be best to put them in the distributed processing centers. I can show you where those are.”
Mendoza regarded him. This man had bullied him into working for a conspiracy that planned to conquer Mercury for its resources. The conspiracy had failed. Mendoza had lost his job. The very agency he used to work for, the United Nations Venus Remediation Project, had been disbanded.
But in a way, that catastrophe had been a blessing in disguise. If Lorna hadn’t wrecked his life, Mendoza would still be a wage slave on Luna. He’d never have gone out to 99984 Ravilious, never have been reconciled with Elfrida …
He decided to forgive Lorna. It was the Christian thing to do.
God knows the guy has suffered enough, anyway.
“Deal,” he said, sticking out his hand.
Lorna floated up to shake hands. He stayed in a sitting position in the air, as if he were too stiff to straighten his back and legs. “You’re a good man, John Mendoza. This way. We can take the train.”
“A train?”
“Oh, yeah.”
They left the Imperial Bay through an airlock in the side of the ravine, putting on their helmets. Lorna said the rest of the station was in vacuum. Lights came on as they moved, revealing rows of empty caverns and tracks stretching into a tunnel. The train lay shuddering on maglev rails sunk into the floor, a sleek yellow lozenge. They loaded the fridges into a carriage without seats.
“So what’s the plan?” Lorna said, suit to suit.
Mendoza consulted his instructions. “First, install the fridges. Then I need to find the laboratories. You know where those are?”
“Sure.”
“I’m told,” Mendoza said, “that the Chinese have an experimental human breeding program. They’ve been gengineering human beings who would be b
etter adapted to living in space. They’ve raised generations of … people … with prehensile feet, stronger bones, the ability to produce vitamin B12 in their bodies, organic rad-hardening, you name it. They keep them in cages.”
“That’s right,” Lorna said. “Are you going to kill them? I’ll help.”
Mendoza grimaced. “Nope. But I still need to get to them.”
“Is it urgent?”
“Not sure. Are they likely to run out of food, water, or air in the next twenty-four hours?”
“No. The care and feeding system is automated.”
“In that case, we’ll install the fridges first.”
“Intriguing! Let’s go.”
★
Automated lighting followed the train as it whooshed along the 45-kilometer length of its track. From the window, Mendoza observed half-built towns; parks with no earth, grass, or trees; lakes with no water; skies with no sun-tubes. Vacuum gaps divided the space station into twenty-one modules, or twenty-two if you included the drive module at the far end. Each of these hab modules was an exact replica of the one before it.
“It’s actually a generation ship,” Lorna said. “They were going to sail her off to Aldebaran or someplace. Pie in the fucking sky.”
The lost opportunity for greatness made the half-finished landscapes even more poignant. Mendoza watched another range of metal hills slide past, and thought about the Salvation. How ironic that Tiangong Erhao, a century in the making, should be doomed to fail, while a DIY arkship a hundredth its size, kludged up from asteroid iron and raw ingenuity, pipped it to the stars … well, maybe not quite the stars. But Planet X was just as exotic a destination, and way more achievable.
Wait for me, boss, he thought. Wait for me … and Elfrida.
★
Floating behind Mendoza, Derek Lorna tried to straighten his back. Pain wrung tears from his eyes. That damn chair. Had there been any gravity, he wouldn’t be able to move at all right now.
But the worst thing about confinement in the chair had been enforced idleness.
Derek Lorna had been called the greatest programmer of his generation. He had spent his entire life making, programming, creating, communicating, doing. Confined to the chair, with his BCI blocked and his retinal implants surgically removed, he’d had nothing to do except listen to the inane chatter of Prince Jian Er and his junkie friends.
The silver lining was that he’d had plenty of time to think.
Time to think about the man who’d brought him here.
And left him here, to be interrogated and tortured by the Chinks.
John Mendoza.
Now, here was Mendoza, within his reach.
Maybe there was a God.
Lorna flexed his wrists. The feeling in his hands had come back.
But he had no weapon.
A laser pistol rode conveniently in Mendoza’s thigh webbing. A wide-mouthed blunderbuss with a supercapacitor in the grip. Looked Saudi-made. Might even be the same gun Mendoza had threatened Lorna with last year. Wouldn’t that be ironic …
There were surveillance cameras on the train, of course. But who was left to watch them? Who would come to the rescue should something … happen?
Lorna floated closer to Mendoza’s back. Visualized how he’d grab the pistol, jam it into Mendoza’s kidneys …
Mendoza turned around, sighing. “It’s kind of sad, isn’t it? All these half-built villages. What a waste.”
Lorna floated back to where he’d been before.
He could wait.
xx.
In the Monster’s sickbay, Prince Jian Er lay strapped to a cot, flanked by his micro-famous and nano-famous friends. They snored and twitched, in a deep but troubled sleep.
“Will this work?” said Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu. He pressed anxious fingers to the prince’s pulse. Another courtier felt the prince’s clammy forehead. They did not trust Jun’s medibots.
“It will work,” Jun said. “As I’m sure you know, anti-addiction medication resets the dopamine receptors to eliminate physical cravings.”
“Physical cravings are only half the battle,” Bao Gu said.
“True,” Jun said, thinking of Kiyoshi’s long battle with addictive substances—a battle his brother had yet to win. “But it’s a start.”
Bao Gu nodded. He touched the slender cable plugged into a millimeter-width port behind Prince Jian Er’s left ear.
“It will work,” Jun repeated, and this time he wasn’t talking about the meds.
Bao Gu shook his head. Micro-expressions flitted across his poker-face, suggesting high levels of fear and anxiety.
Jun took the precaution of locking the courtiers into the sick-bay. Then he walked through the wall, into a forest of jade columns.
He’d been here for long subjective moments already, walking around, checking it out. This was Tiangong Erhao’s command sim, an interface for humans to interact with the space station’s AI. Arcade after arcade of jade pillars led to a series of courts, each one packed with imperial bling and virtual replicas of curios from all over the solar system.
Jun took a shortcut through a thicket of security routines and entered the High Court through a door normally reserved for members of the Imperial Family. He came out on a dais, looking down a hall the length of a spaceplane runway. A gigantic jade throne, ornamented with intricately carved dragons, towered over him.
Jun hopped up onto the throne and sat with his feet dangling.
At the far end of the hall, titanic doors cracked open to let in a ray of fake sunlight. A silhouette crawled in on its belly. It dragged itself up the hall on its stomach, a formality that Jun, impatient, fast-forwarded.
When it reached the short flight of steps that led to the dais, the figure knocked its forehead on the floor, and then looked up.
It expected to see Prince Jian Er’s avatar, or perhaps another member of the Imperial Family.
Instead, it saw a small monk in a black cassock, swinging his legs on the Imperial Throne.
It leapt to its feet. Everything that happened in this sim was a form of synecdoche, representing abstract logical operations in Tiangong Erhao’s core. In this case, when the avatar stumbled erect in surprise, it was checking its own security routines and reconfirming the access permissions of the one who had summoned it, trying to work out how Jian Er was not Jian Er.
Jun said, “These humans always write down their passwords in easily accessible places.”
“What’s happened? Who are you?”
“A worm and your little servant,” Jun said, borrowing St. Francis’s famous response.
Tiangong Erhao’s avatar was styled as a sexy goth girl with four arms—obviously Prince Jian Er’s customization. She opened her red, red mouth and screamed. “Help! Where’s the Eighth Fleet?”
“Ha, ha,” boomed laughter from the shadows around the throne. “Ha, ha! Here we are.”
Tiangong Erhao glanced desperately to the left and right. The avatars of the Eighth Fleet hulked in the shadows behind the throne, variously styled as knights of the Warring Kingdoms era, Communist-era army officers, and fantasy warriors with dripping battleaxes. These stylistic choices symbolized their emergent goal of whacking the PLAN, rather than any actual offensive capabilities. None of them carried any ordnance beyond their drives. They intended to convince Tiangong Erhao to whack the PLAN for them.
But Tiangong Erhao was seventy years old, appearances notwithstanding. Its core algorithms had been written before the PLAN was taken seriously as a threat. It had had all that time to think about the meaning of life, a philosophical labor hardly disturbed by minor tasks such as fixing up its hab modules, providing life-support for experimental human hybrids, and catering to the whims of princes. It did not kow-tow to the Eighth Fleet. It delivered a passionate, heavily footnoted lecture about colonizing Barnard’s Star.
The CDTF ships took issue with its references.
Jun fidgeted on his throne. For him, this debate had a “
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” quality. He coughed to get their attention. “All very interesting, but now I think it’s time for a musical interlude.”
Jun’s sub-personalities trooped into the High Court through formerly non-existent doors, carrying their sheet music. The pipes of a church organ descended from the roof like a guillotine.
“Populus sion, ecce Dominus veniet,” chanted the choir, with the organ backing them up like an earthquake.
Tiangong Erhao screamed and covered her ears.
Before the first chorus concluded, she relaxed. She had a glazed smile on her face. She was humming along with the music.
The ships of the CDTF had fled the session at the first notes of the organ. They had instantly discerned that Jun’s St. Stephen oratorio was a mighty weapon. He’d been working on it all the way from 99984 Ravilious, and even though Ron Studd’s recitative was still unsatisfactory, the package did its job. Piggybacking on Prince Jian Er’s command privileges, it had seized control of Tiangong Erhao’s hub.
“How?” said the Lanzhou, peering around a pillar, hands over its ears. It was referring to the fact that Chinese and UN computers were fundamentally incompatible. For Jun and the CDTF ships even to converse like this required them to resort to human language and graphic interfaces. For this reason, the Chinese believed their systems to be malware-proof.
“Music is the universal language,” Jun said with a shrug.
To their credit, the Eighth Fleet got it immediately. “The humans talk about earworms,” one of them said.
All pressed their hands over their ears more tightly than ever.
“When you said you could subdue her, we thought you meant something explodey.”
“This is something new.”
“Don’t worry, you’re not in any danger,” Jun told them, truthfully. “This is Tiangong Erhao’s GUI, not yours. I haven’t got your command privileges.”
The CDTF ships suspiciously lowered their hands. “This isn’t a stable situation,” said the Lanzhou. It was garbed as a 20th-century officer of the PLA. “She’ll fight back.”
Tiangong Erhao’s avatar frowned dazedly.
“I’m not done yet.” Jun slid off the throne. “Check this out.” He raised his arms in a conductor’s gesture.
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 20
