by Gwynn White
She pattered into a pedestrian tunnel lined with souvenir stalls.
Music seeped from the other end, mingled with sales pitches.
A pig on wings swooped through the tunnel, startling laughter from tourists.
Elfrida burst into the Y-Zone.
★
Precious seconds ticking away, she circled through the famous street market. She passed the piercing stall she and Colden had patronized night before last. Now that she was a bit less frozen, her crotch ached. She passed by a man selling gengineered pet rats with pastel fur, and then a shish kebab vendor. The two were probably in business together.
All at once, night fell. That was how it happened here. No dimming of the light, no subtlety.
The Y-Zone seemed to go silent for a moment, as if drawing a deep breath. Then the neon blazed out, drawing a collective Oooooh! from the tourists.
Club Anonymous.
Elfrida spotted the lurid sign of the club where she and Colden had gone dancing.
Maybe she could find someone in there, someone who’d remember her, someone who could help. Someone anonymous.
She leapt up the outside stairs. Her ‘outfit’ earned an admiring nod from the bouncer. He gestured her inside without any hassle.
The music hit her like a truck. Disoriented, she turned in circles. The club was still empty. A few loved-up couples and trios writhed on the dancefloor. A drop-dead gorgeous waitress shimmied up to her. “Help you, honey?”
“Oh, if only you could.”
The waitress stared at her for a minute and then nodded. “This way.” She took Elfrida’s hand in a firm, maternal grip and led her up the spiral stairs in the middle of the dancefloor. Another bar up here. Behind that, more stairs. Elfrida imagined that she was being led to a staff bathroom to clean up. Or maybe the waitress thought she was on psychotropic drugs, and was removing her from harm’s way. She tried to explain that her friends were in danger, but the waitress merely nodded and said, ‘Mhm.’ Her grip on Elfrida’s hand was very firm.
Elfrida tugged free.
The waitress set her hand in the small of Elfrida’s back and shoved.
Elfrida stumbled through an automatic door into a telepresence room.
She immediately recognized the setup: a double row of couches that could recline all the way back, with headsets, masks, and gloves attached to each one. As part of her training, she had had to log many hours in a similar room on board the Sargent Shriver.
Telepresence was a technology for remotely operating phavatars—physical avatars, robots with rich sensory feedback capabilities—that could be as far as twenty light minutes away. The Space Corps relied on phavatars when it was too dangerous or expensive to send an agent in the flesh. However, telepresence had leisure applications as well as practical ones. This would be something for the patrons of Club Anonymous to do when they got bored of drugging and necking. Elfrida decided she did not want to know what kind of phavatars the club owned, or where they were.
Suddenly the far wall of the room went transparent. It was a window, with a splendid view of the Y-Zone. There was a balcony outside. Elfrida hurried to the window and searched for the catch.
Timothy Shyaka dropped onto the balcony. Elfrida jumped back in shock.
Shyaka pressed his palm on a sensor. The window slid open to admit him, and closed again.
“It’s convenient to have friends in business,” Shyaka explained. “Specially in this business. There’s always more than one way in.”
Elfrida tried her contacts. “Help!” she flung out on the public channel, which was like a community billboard that everyone on Ganymede could see. “Help! I’m being held captive by a bunch of loonies!”
**TRANSMISSION FAILED** said her contacts.
“Oh. Of course. This is an off-line club,” Elfrida mumbled. All wireless comms were blocked within the building. She had enjoyed this atmosphere two nights ago. She did not feel so free now. More like trapped.
“Were you trying to call or text someone, Ms. Goto?” Shyaka said.
“My friends. They’re on a spaceship called the Love Shack. The captain’s planning to kidnap them; or space them.”
“Ah, yes. Brad Layemall. He’s well known to us.”
“Do something.”
“What did you have in mind, Ms. Goto?”
Shyaka’s eyes were as black and gloomy as the tunnels under Farm Dome 3. Elfrida broke eye contact.
He’s well known to us. That didn’t sound as if Shyaka were saying that Captain Layemall was a personal friend. But clearly, he knew about the POCK smuggling racket. Colden was right. He set us up.
“Do you have any intention of saving their lives, or not?” she burst out.
Shyaka gazed out of the window. “UNSA’s position here is delicate. You’re asking us to declare war on the black economy. Do that, and Ganymede wouldn’t have much of an economy left.” He swung around. His melancholy tone turned fierce. “Humanitarian concerns? I share ’em, Ms. Goto. I share ‘em. But we’ve been instructed to avoid anything that could lead to further mission creep. UNSA was formed to spearhead exploration of the trans-Jovian planets; not to hound petty criminals across the outer reaches of the solar system.”
“So you’re going to sacrifice my friends to implement a bureaucratic directive.” Elfrida clenched her fists. “I quit!”
Someone else climbed onto the balcony; from below, this time. It was the dean of the Space Corps Academy, a man in his fifties, as fit as he was feared by the trainees. He entered the same way Shyaka had, and took off his coat, hanging it tidily on the back of a couch.
“I fucking quit!” Elfrida screamed at him. “You can take the Space Corps and frag it! Help and support people in space, har dee har har! You can’t even save two of your own trainees!”
“Fine,” the dean said. He pointed at the window. “There’s the door. The Space Corps will survive without you. We get two to three thousand applicants for every available place at the Academy.”
“What about Colden and Kristiansen?”
The dean looked at Shyaka. Shyaka looked back at him and shrugged. Elfrida was suddenly confused. The UNSA outreach coordinator seemed to be deferring to the dean of the Space Corps Academy, who was just a visiting academic.
“Tell me,” the dean said to Elfrida. “You thought the POCK cull was a test. Am I correct?”
“Y-yes.”
“What do you think now?”
Elfrida remembered what Kristiansen had said. She borrowed his words. “I think it was a dry run to determine our psychological suitability for work with asteroid populations. We were supposed to find out about the POCK smuggling racket. And we did. But what’s the point, if freaking UNSA won’t lift a finger to stop it?”
“It isn’t UNSA’s job to stop it.”
“I already explained that to her,” Shyaka said.
“It takes repetition for anything to sink into their wretched skulls. Do you understand, Ms. Goto? It isn’t UNSA’s job.”
“Then who—”
“It’s yours.”
The dean went to the nearest couch and picked up the attached headset. He grimaced in distaste. “You’re supposed to sterilize these after each use. Ms. Goto? If you’re serious about saving your friends, put this headset on and do the job we’ve spent a fortune training you to do. Otherwise—” he gestured at the picture window.
Elfrida gazed out at the flashing, seductive panorama of the Y-Zone.
But only for a minute.
She took the headset, dropped into the couch, and logged in.
★
Out on the surface, a couple of dozen chubby snowmen skied the slopes of the manmade cryovolcano.
It was sheer bad luck that Elfrida had not run into any of these robots on her trek to Neith Spaceport. They looked like snowmen, but they were in fact radiation-hardened phavatars. They had been designed as homages to one of the very first humanoid robots ever, the primitive Asimo. Tourists used them to cross “skiing on
Ganymede” off their bucket lists.
All at once, they executed carving turns (their skiis had blades on the bottom, like long ice-skates) and set off in a new direction.
On telepresence couches scattered throughout the Y-Zone, tourists sat up, disoriented, and said, “Huh?”
The phavatars had received new orders. For their next task, no witnesses would be required.
One of them was clumsy on its skis. It kept falling over, and the others had to go back and help it up.
This was the phavatar being operated by Elfrida.
Through its googly eyes, she saw the ice hills in the infrared spectrum. The Love Shack stuck out like a sore thumb. The thinner areas of its skin radiated heat in high contrast to the frozen surface of the moon. Its radiator fins burned crimson.
~Come on, she called to the other phavatars.
They were under the control of their onboard MIs, slaved to hers. The MIs were about as smart as your average dog. They could obey simple instructions.
~Surround the ship!
The Love Shack sat on its frozen puddle, a barrel on a trivet. It had not yet commenced its launch countdown. Elfrida could tell because the drive was cold and dark. However, pre-launch procedures were underway. The ship had flipped 180 degrees, by means of twin mechatronic arms that protruded from its midsection. The tips of the arms were still dug into the ice.
~Search for bodies! Elfrida commanded the other phavatars, although she could see at a glance that there was nothing out here, except for some pieces of POCK meat that the crew must have dropped while they were unloading the maglevator capsule. It looked as if they hadn’t yet carried out their threat to space Colden and Kristiansen.
Unless they’d thrown the bodies down the maglevator shaft.
And if they had, Elfrida was going to get revenge.
There was just one problem.
The airlock was now at the top of the ship, 80 meters above the phavatars’ heads.
~Shit, Elfrida subvocalized. ~How are we going to get up there?
A voice said in her headset: ~I suggest you climb.
The voice belonged to the dean of the Space Corps Academy. He was observing the mission from an adjacent couch in the Club Anonymous telepresence room, and would probably take over if she screwed up. She was determined not to screw up.
~Climb?
The other phavatars interpreted that as a command. They took off their skis, and swarmed up the sides of the ship.
Their blobby feet had retractable spikes on the toes, like crampons. Talons extruded from their chubby fingers. They were driving these into the ship’s graphene-composite drive shield, which was pitted and weakly electrified to improve diffraction of radiation. When they got to the lead-shielded fuselage, they climbed even more easily.
Elfrida looked down at her own phavatar’s hands and feet. Artificial diamond talons popped out, refracting the light of Jupiter.
She remembered how the drainage pipes underground had been chipped and splintered, as if something had been climbing those nearly-sheer slopes.
~Ahem, she subvocalized. ~Does this bot happen to have integrated weaponry, too?
~Harpoon gun, the dean replied sadly. ~In case it should fall down a crevasse. Check the functions menu.
~Is there any way to track who’s been using them?
~These, yes; but this isn’t all of them. When the Ganymede Ski Club went bankrupt a few years back, its phavatars vanished onto the secondary market. The manufacturers have been extremely unhelpful. Don’t worry about that now, Ms. Goto. Keep your mind on the job.
The other phavatars had almost reached the airlock. She scaled the ship’s side, putting her talons where they had. The airlock posed no obstacle. Brad had not been expecting a boarding party. He had not implemented any security measures. The airlock opened when she thumped her phavatar’s fist on the pressure pad.
Half a dozen at a time, they crowded into the hold. The former floor, of course, was now the ceiling. Some of the phavatars peeled off from Elfrida’s command and circled, vidding the cargo.
~You won’t need them all, the dean subvocalized.
That was true, since only one person—or phavatar—could climb the ladder at a time.
The ladder, of course, now led down, not up.
“WTF?!?” shrieked the voice of Brad, Her phavatar picked it up with its audio receiver. “The cargo hold’s full of fucking snowmen!!”
Elfrida located her phavatar’s speech function. Her voice came out as a soft coo, reflecting the fact that this phavatar had originally been developed for elder-care and nursing. (The talons and harpoon gun were optional.) “Hiya, Brad. Where are my friends?”
She yanked the door of the bedroom open with her diamond-taloned hand. The bed was now on the floor, of course. No one was in there. She jumped on the quilts to make sure.
“If you’ve killed them, you’re not going to get away with it!” she cooed.
Leaving the other phavatars to investigate the bedroom more thoroughly, she leapt down the ladder to the operations deck. No one was hiding under the life-support machinery, dead or alive. Once more she leapt through a hatch, and landed on the bridge.
Kristiansen sat at the captain’s workstation, so absorbed in whatever he was doing that he barely glanced around.
Speechless, Elfrida took in the rest of the grim tableau. Colden and the lavender-complected Qiana sat on the floor in the middle of the bridge. Colden had one arm wrapped around Qiana’s neck, as if they were friends. But in Colden’s other hand was the pistol that Elfrida had relinquished to her, and its muzzle was jammed against Qiana’s fragile lavender temple.
Brad and Nell stood on the far side of the bridge, rendered impotent by Colden’s ploy.
Colden’s gaze flicked to Elfrida’s phavatar. “Oh shit,” she said wearily. “The aliens really are here.”
Brad took advantage of the momentary distraction. He launched himself across the bridge and tackled Colden, roaring.
The pistol went off with a noise like a car crash.
Elfrida fired her harpoon gun at Brad. She missed. The harpoon penetrated the astrogator’s workstation and wrecked it.
Qiana’s body rolled out of the scrum. Half her head was missing.
Kristiansen leapt on Brad’s back and punched him wildly, shouting Colden’s name.
“Everyone calm down,” shouted the voice of Tom the hub. “Captain, I regret to inform you that you are under arrest.”
Elfrida jettisoned her harpoon. Skidding on Qiana’s blood and brains, she dodged around the melee. She hugged Nell, pinioning her arms, immobilizing the woman. “That’s what you get for fucking with the Space Corps,” she cooed.
Then the other phavatars piled onto the bridge, and it was over.
★
Two days later, Elfrida, Colden, and Kristiansen stood on the lawn in Timothy Shyaka’s office in the A-Zone.
The grass under their feet was a LivingLawn™—another invention of the busy biotechnologists of Ganymede. Having developed crops that could grow underground, they naturally went on to develop a lawn that could grow in your living-room. LivingLawns had caught on throughout the solar system, although they were considered a bit 2260’s, now.
Elfrida scrunched her bare toes in the grass. She was wearing her Space Corps uniform—a stiff tunic and knee-length culottes, UN blue—but Shyaka had asked them to take their shoes off so as not to bruise the LivingLawn. Oddly, she felt more naked than she had the last time they met, when she had been clad only in her underwear.
Beside her, Colden and Kristiansen shifted their weight, as nervous as she was.
“This is an artificial environment,” Shyaka said. Standing at his desk in a suit and tie, he spun a globe of Ganymede. A cutaway segment showed the planet’s interior. “We live in a bubble of atmosphere in the crust. 100 kilometers below our feet, a salty ocean sloshes around the moon. We’ve drilled down to it. We still don’t know exactly how deep it is. Just getting down that far pushed our
drilling technology to its limits.
“The hope—or depending who you ask, the fear—was that the ocean would turn out to support indigenous life.
“Eukaryotes, bacteria, ichthyosaurs, mermen with an advanced civilization—no matter how primitive or sophisticated the aliens turned out to be, their existence would spell the end of this colony.
“Money would flow in from all over the system. Ganymede’s economy would be transformed by the rush to study, communicate with, and exploit the aliens.
“But it hasn’t happened. The discovery has not been made. The evidence suggests at this point that there is nothing to discover. There’s nothing down here except salt water.
“So we’re on our own. Just us and our pets.
“Which brings me, naturally, to the POCKs.”
Shyaka moved away from his desk. The ‘window’ of his office was actually a screen, showing a view of the farms. He clicked his fingers, and they watched footage of POCKs scavenging. ‘Scavenging’ was not the right word for it, Elfrida realized. The animals moved methodically along the rows, pulling up every fifth or sixth yam and brushing the artificial soil off with their paws. One acted as lookout. When it waved a paw in the air, the whole group fled—carrying their haul, not in their mouths, but in squares of cloths, whose corners they gripped in their teeth.
“Do you understand now?” Shyaka said.
It was Kristiansen who answered. “Yes.” His face contorted as if he were struggling with strong emotions. “They’re partly human.”
“Human?” Elfrida yelped.
“Partly?” Colden said.
“Correct,” Shyaka said flatly. “If this were a just universe, those gengineers would be hanged. They made their hamsters bigger, hardier—and, incidentally, smarter—by using what they had to hand: their own genetic material.”
Elfrida said, “But all along, the plan was to eat them?”
“Correct.”
Colden covered her mouth. She said indistinctly, “Those sandwiches.”
