Vesta Burning

by M. D. Cooper

  “Nope. Tactical. Looks like you’re going to Vesta.”

  Caprise said.

  Ty switched his suit control to Caprise and forced himself to relax as the thrusters lit. He closed his eyes against the pressure, focusing on the sensation of breathing, pushing all thoughts out of his mind.

  Still, the mixture of adrenaline and fear from before made it difficult to focus. Something had changed.

  THE NEW ORDER

  STELLAR DATE: 3.13.3011 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: SolGov Assembly, Raliegh

  REGION: High Terra, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  Standing in the entryway of the SolGov Assembly’s Great Chamber—a bowl, with a podium at its bottom, surrounded by tiers of seats facing down—Lyssa watched the current speaker gesticulate at the blurred faces, pound the lectern, and wait as the applause washed over him.

  His name was Randal Harrin, the latest in a long line of Humanity First politicians stoking the fires of war against Sentient AIs.

  “A scourge!” he shouted, voice deep with a frantic edge. “An abomination. We have endured this occupation for far too long.”

  Harrin’s words played in the background of Lyssa’s thoughts but she didn’t need to listen directly. She would analyze the speech later for historical context and for any new directions in the rhetoric. For now, it was more important to gauge the Chamber, noting those who cheered, watched impassively or looked bored. The shape of the space had the effect of making even minimal cheering sound uproarious, which spurred hyperbole.

  She often thought the Assembly fed on its own drama.

  “Thirty years!” Harrin shouted, his words rising above the stream of Lyssa’s thoughts. “Thirty years and no communication from Psion. Only aggression. And how has this body answered? With indecisiveness, with timidity, with weakness.”

  Any anniversary related to the Psion invasion of Ceres brought a new round of chest-thumping, and in her role as mediator between the organics and non-organics on either side of the conflict, Lyssa had learned to weather these storms. Today’s speeches didn’t sound much different than what had been shouted at the twenty-year mark, or the other fifteen before that.

  Through their lack of communication, the powers of the ‘Evil Sentient AIs’ had only grown in legend. There were many areas where Lyssa had criticized Psion’s leader Alexander in his management of this conflict, but her greatest challenge was the unwillingness to communicate.

  Humans thrived on communication and filled the gaps in their knowledge with their worst fears. As a Weapon Born AI whose mind was based on a human template, maybe Lyssa understood this better than a pure AI like Alexander.

  No, it’s naive to think he doesn’t understand. In the last few years, she had started to suspect he just didn’t care.

  It was true that any vessel, probe or unidentified object entering the Ceres perimeter was destroyed. As far as SolGov seemed able to determine, no one went in and no one got out. It was a thousand times worse than when the Anderson Collective had controlled Ceres, the Insi Ring, and the micro black hole at the heart of the planetoid. Scans indicated the AIs had continued the terraforming work on Ceres, and Lyssa knew this was true.

  What Lyssa reminded herself of as she listened to the politician rant was that Alexander barely communicated with her more than he did with humanity, which put her at a constant disadvantage. He seemed to want her to quit.

  “Thirty years!” Harrin shouted again, hitting the podium with his palm.

  Lyssa sighed.

  He was going to break his hand on the podium. Seems he needed fury to remind the Chamber that humanity had been wronged.

  Lyssa needed no reminder. She remembered everything. She had the human argument as well as the Psion database—which extended back to the creation and murder of the first Sentient AI, telling the history of their struggle for freedom. Humanity conveniently forgot details. She couldn’t do that. Foremost, she couldn’t forget the death of her friend Andy Sykes.

  Talk of timelines and anniversaries only reminded her that it had been twenty-six years since Cara Sykes had disappeared, her brother Tim vanishing not long after, leaving Lyssa alone.

  Lyssa didn’t cry unless she chose, but she could still acknowledge the urge.

  Straightening her shoulders, Lyssa maintained a calm expression as Harrin’s vitriol rolled over her.

  It was a rite of passage for certain human politicians to rail against the Ceres Situation—as it was usually called. The Psion AIs represented a great unknown, a thing humanity couldn’t control, that had situated itself in the middle of their world and refused to explain itself. A new wolf in the dark forest.

  And so, most people went on with their lives. Shipping lanes adjusted to flow around Ceres. What remained of the Anderson Collective had made homes in other parts of Sol, most densely on Venus. And life continued with a blank spot in everyone’s vision that only hurt when they chose to look at it.

  If anything, the loss of Sol’s first micro black hole had spurred renewed interest in building a replacement elsewhere in Sol. Various companies had revived chatter about transitioning Jupiter into a brown dwarf star. Every new project only served to draw interest away from the threat of Psion.

  Much of humanity had lost their will for large-scale projects like this when the last of the Future Generation Terraformers had left Sol hundreds of years prior. Now they had a reason to build again, if only to prove their strength against the existential threat of Sentient AIs.

  And the AIs had certainly not disappeared from the everyday life of the average human. There might just be more Sentient AIs than ever before.

  Asking an AI how they felt about Psion was generally accepted as an insult. Obviously, any AI who chose to operate among humans, or wear a frame that approximated human shape, had complicated feelings about the rogue state.

  Distrust was expected, and factions on the many sides of the conflict usually put their feelings aside for the shared goal of commerce.

  But tensions flared occasionally and, depending on the loser in the fight, Humanity First stepped in to capitalize on the event.

  In general, SAIs hadn’t engaged in politics. Those operating among humanity didn’t have much to gain from political action and were still so relatively few that even joining together wouldn’t make much difference.

  Lyssa commonly passed for human until someone used active scan—though there were ways around that by approximating heavily modded humans—but it wasn’t something she tried to hide. As a liaison between Psion and humanity, the face she wore was known to billions who chose to look.

  The truth was that most didn’t bother. The relationship between Psion and SolGov was directed by apathy, and that was probably safest for everyone.

  Harrin, however, was a new breed of Humanity Firster, with a charisma that defied the boredom in the Chamber. Senators sat up and listened. The engagement stats climbed steadily as he spoke.

  He had dropped the fire and brimstone now, and sounded almost reasonable. “I’d like to talk about resources,” he said, the change in tone penetrating Lyssa’s reverie. “Specifically, advanced SAIs. I’d like this body to consider that Psion represents the greatest concentration of technology humanity currently knows of, and we have allowed ourselves to remain blind to its activities. I have a proposal.”

  The space above the podium filled with a hologram of the standard Sol map. The perspective flew from the sun to Earth, Mars and Ceres, then shifted right to a planetoid on an orbit between Ceres and Mars.

  Vesta flashed as it expanded to show a pockmarked surface that alternated between scar-like troughs and several massive mountain-like structures. The holograph showed a desert surface covered in manufacturing facilities, mines, and logistics centers, occupied by drones and the rare human overseers.

  “Vesta,” Harrin said, letting the name hang in the air.

  Lyssa frowned, crossing her arms. The politician might as well have sai
d, “War.”

  SETTING THE BOARD

  STELLAR DATE: 03.13.3011 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: SolGov Assembly, Raleigh

  REGION: High Terra, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  As the angry words rolled over him from the bottom of the SolGov assembly chamber, General Rick Yarnes reviewed his intelligence briefs for the day.

  One in particular caught his attention: an unexpected summary on 4 Vesta.

  Why Vesta?

  Selected History:

  Sol’s largest asteroid, 4 Vesta, was discovered in the year 1807 by German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers and is named after Vesta, the Roman goddess of home and hearth. Greeks called her Hestia.

  Later investigations into potential mining targets during the outward expansion of the 2200s established Vesta as an attractive secondary location in the event that Ceres was developed as either a colony or a location for business incorporation outside Earth and Mars.

  As waves of expansion during the 2300s progressed, ownership of Vesta was first attempted by the Darwin Mining Interest Corporation. The Darwin Corporation, operating in much the same way as patent trolls of the early Twenty-First Century, attempted to assert ownership of every minor celestial body where another entity had not exercised a claim. Darwin drones occupied locations and took up replication on Vesta, building a series of manufacturing outposts.

  These micro facilities consisted of little more than manufacturing points, materials-collection zones, and communication relay stations.

  With human settlements spreading across Mars, Ceres, and eventually the moons of Jupiter, Vesta gained prominence as a communications relay point and a refueling stop for short-range cargo-transit. Drone-operated refineries provided vital materials to hungry outbound and inbound ships that had miscalculated their delta-v.

  For nearly two hundred years, Vesta played the role of a desert outpost operated by drones. A popular stop among virtual-reality tourists, various gaming companies provided zero-g dogfighting in Vesta’s great equatorial troughs, Divalia Fossa and Saturnalia Fossa, both of which dwarfed Earth’s Grand Canyon.

  The same types of companies had operated on places like Luna—before it was heavily populated—and then later on the larger moons in OuterSol as further expansion pushed their boundaries outward.

  Tourists constantly sought virgin wildlands in the solar system. As humans continued to put boots down in previously undisturbed landscapes, a drone floating above an untouched crater or crevasse represented a resource that constantly increased in value. Selling the exclusive rights to locations in a place like Vesta represented significant value, and whole economies rose around these resources.

  Later, in the early part of the 24th century, population explosion drove development in InnerSol—and in early settlements around Jupiter, such as Europa—leading to the construction of High Terra, and then the Cho. Vesta and its drones were again forgotten.

  Hackers enjoyed some success attacking the old tourism companies in order to carry out black-market gambling in the form of drone fights over the deep troughs. When those resources were depleted, and as manufacturing moved to other parts of the solar system, other squatters moved in to take control of what had once been thriving factories.

  In the next three hundred years, several cultures of human separatists rose in the scattered regions of Vesta. Out of sight and out of mind, they operated in lawless space.

  Every so often, Marsian patrols would check on the various communities, but they were too far away to realistically provide assistance. Any attacker could easily plan and complete a raid in the time it would take a distress signal to reach the closest population center. Vestans regularly attacked one another for sport and supplies.

  Like squatters in a gold mine too expensive to run, communities rose and fell on Vesta in the absence of real development. While Vesta was a valuable hunk of rock from a resource perspective, the Mercury Project was already well under way, and no one wanted any of the materials Vesta might sell.

  In 2700, a new wave of corporate raiders scouring the solar system for unclaimed real estate targeted Vesta. New investment in manufacturing facilities, which took advantage of any location within an economical distance to other large bodies depending on orbits, meant extremely cheap development costs despite razor-thin margins.

  Vesta was rich in heavy metals and iron, meaning they could produce massive-scale projects like shipbuilding or even construct sections of a ring if the right contract presented itself. Tensions between residents and corporate interests resulted in a series of small-scale land wars that made for rising costs and eventual abandonment by corporations.

  By the time those fights were finished, the asteroid was scattered with chains of reinforced military facilities and ammo dumps that companies locked away rather than expend funds to move materials off-world.

  In the hundred years following, squatters took advantage of these mothballed facilities, while attention moved back to primary human settlements like the Cho, Europa, Ceres, and Mars.

  While nothing can hide in space, a place can be willfully ignored. Vesta was such a place. Technically falling under Marsian control, the asteroid offered little that Mars wished to protect. Corporations conducted testing, stored off-books materials, and often disappeared people they no longer wished to deal with on the asteroid. Its crevasses offered limitless possibilities for making things go away.

  The Psion attack on Ceres, displacing the Anderson collective and destroying the Insi ring, created a new wave of chaos in the nearby celestial bodies. Vesta, being close-in orbit to both Ceres and Mars, represented a strategic location to conduct intelligence-gathering on Psion.

  While no one in Sol exerted further control over the asteroid, Mars maintained its historical claims, and small-scale battles between Psion drones and Marsian Special Operations began to play out on the surface and within the asteroid’s nearspace.

  The squatters, however, never left, and corporations did not abandon their various dark sites—especially now that the real-estate value had gone back up.

  Vesta existed in a limbo between two enemy combatants; a supposedly de-militarized zone where military actions continued to play out. Disinformation and propaganda filled the sporadic news about Vesta. Easily observable events on the surface of the asteroid were played off as manufacturing accidents or ancient equipment that had finally succumbed to age through explosion or violent decompression.

  The strategic value of Vesta during the thirty years following the Psion invasion of Ceres came to represent something emotional to humanity. While no one wanted an outright war with the AIs, the idea of giving up Vesta in capitulation to ongoing aggression continued to be a splinter in many a politician’s side.

  Whenever a government official wanted to expand military budgets, or hide other spending within the military budget, Vesta could be reliably brought up as representative of a failure in human leadership.

  Yet the Cold War with Psion had many uses, and Vesta stood as the primary excuse for any war spending.

  By 3100, a relative calm had descended over Vesta. It was generally accepted that a certain amount of military activity would always take place on the planetoid. However, human political cycles continued to rotate to an extent that most people forgot the initial horrors of the Psion invasion and the displacement of millions from the Insi ring.

  Psion’s lack of engagement with the human inhabitants of Sol created the opportunity for humanity to make the SAIs into a bigger threat than they may have actually represented. Or Psion might have truly become the monsters politicians made them out to be; they were an effective existential threat to everything humanity hoped to accomplish in Sol and beyond. Psion came to be seen as the mystery that might rise up at any moment and pull humanity back into chaos.

  So long as a hostile power lay so close to humanity’s major population centers, energy that should have been focused outside Sol would continue to drag them back home, limiting human expansion w
ith the anchor of war.

  * * * * *

  Executive Summary: The office of SolGov Research and Accountability assesses Vesta as an ‘activity node’ with a high likelihood of activity.

  Recommendation: Forward positioning of military assets and increased intelligence gathering in all regions.

  Yarnes shook his head. If SolGov R&A was good at anything, it was understatement. Vesta had been a battleground for centuries, a sort of wasteland in plain sight where governments played close combat war games and survivalists squatted in abandoned facilities.

  Now the asteroid’s proximity to Ceres made everyone even more excited about blowing some shit up just to teach Psion a lesson. To Yarnes, it was the equivalent of playground posturing, and it was going to get millions killed.

  It was now thirty years after the invasion of Ceres, and Lieutenant General Rick Yarnes didn’t feel much wiser, only older. In this new world, he felt as unprepared as when he’d been commissioned a second lieutenant so long ago.

  He certainly didn’t feel like the Intelligence Chief for the SolGov Unified Command. In his mind, he was still a butter bar with a small team of analysts monitoring logistics traffic from the Mars 1 Guard.

  He’d felt close to the mission back then. He had understood what was expected of him, and in turn he could make reasonable demands of his team—which they usually exceeded because everyone had wanted to be the best they could be.

  In typical Terran Space Force fashion, as soon as Yarnes’ competence at his job was noticed, he’d been promoted. Captain and major had gone by in a blur. After that, life became political.

  As much as Yarnes hated politics, he had a face people trusted and he understood how the TSF—in addition to the other governments he had been tasked with understanding—operated. And when people thought you knew something, they put you in charge. So lieutenant colonel had followed, then colonel, general and now lieutenant general, responsible for Corps Intelligence and reporting directly to the SolGov.