The Vesta Conspiracy: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 2)

by Felix R. Savage

  Cydney had never imagined that Shoshanna and the gang had the nerve to pull a stunt like this.

  They’d broadcast a list of demands. More money for field research, more support for disadvantaged students, faster wifi in the dormitories, the establishment of a Literature degree course, and a new coffee machine for the PHCTBS Studies lounge.

  I could get through to them, Cydney thought.

  Nothing was happening here, anyway. She hurried back to campus. On her way, she explained to her fans what she was planning to to do. Their support—expressed in comments, and a corresponding gush of micropayments—solidified her resolve. Finding Dean Garcia in her office, she offered, “Ma’am, I’ll go talk to them.”

  Garcia was flapping around, fielding questions and issuing statements on half a dozen channels. “We gave them what they wanted,” she said to Cydney. “Why are they doing this?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. But often, when you give people what they want, they ask for more.”

  “That’s very profound, Ms. Blaisze. Go on, go on, if you think it will do any good! You needn’t ask my permission.”

  Cydney had a feeling she’d just been mocked. But this didn’t dampen her resolve. She had the expectations of 5,022,369 people to live up to, and counting.

  She climbed the hill out of town, commenting on the strange cavalcade she passed along the way. It looked like a parade of recycling bins with legs. A couple of quickie interviews confirmed that this was a bug-out movement heading for the Bremen Lock. If the order came to evacuate, these folks planned to be first in line. They seemed to be few (so far), and they were mostly families with young children. But it proved that at least some residents of the ecohood were taking Shoshanna’s threats seriously.

  Cydney felt slightly less confident about her read of the situation. But she bounded on, outdistancing the parade.

  Facilities Management blazed like a theater on opening night. A new banner billowed above the vine-wreathed columns out front: JUSTICE! EQUALITY! TOLERANCE!

  Cydney looked back down the hill. The town and campus lay mired in darkness.

  Suppressing a shiver, she fluffed her hair and bounced towards the entrance. She didn’t have to succeed. It would be OK if she failed. She just had to be entertaining while she was failing. That was her shtick.

  “Hey! Shoshanna! Helloooo!”

  A text popped up in her HUD.

  “Hey, good to see you, Cydney. C’mon in.”

  Win Khin and another student met her at the entrance and apologetically frisked her. Jittery activists milled in the reception area. They’d hacked the smart posters so as to watch themselves on the news. On one poster, this very room now appeared; it was Cydney’s feed. Noticing, they mugged and postured for her.

  Cydney was just getting into the swim of things, firing off questions, screaming with laughter, accepting a puff of someone’s cigarette, when Shoshanna appeared. She pulled Cydney into the services manager’s office and closed the door. “They’re having fun now,” she said. “Hope the drugs don’t run out too soon.”

  “Someone’s got stim,” Cydney said, feeling the drug bubble through her adrenal system.

  “Yeah.” Shoshanna folded her arms. She stared at Cydney. Then she reached out and pinched Cydney’s left earlobe between her thumb and forefinger.

  5,068,915 people saw Cydney’s feed go dark.

  “Hey!”

  Shoshanna pulled Cydney closer. Blades flashed in her other hand. She cut off Cydney’s earlobe with the services manager’s desk scissors.

  Cydney screamed. She clamped her hands over her ear, crumpling to the floor. Blood travelled in dotted arcs through the air like movement lines in a manga strip.

  Shoshanna tossed her a box of tissues.

  “Sorry about that. But I want to control the optics here. I’m putting it in this drawer, OK?” She held up Cydney’s earlobe, with its embedded microcamera, and dropped it into a desk drawer.

  Cydney vomited.

  “You can always get it reconstructed,” Shoshanna said. “I thought you were tough.”

  The words filtered like the buzzing of an insect through the unbearable pain. Cydney subvocalized to her fans: ~Hey … guys. Don’t go anywhere. This bitch just cut. My. Fucking. Ear. Off. Yeah. This is not a snerk situation anymore.

  “Well put,” said Shoshanna, who was obviously monitoring Cydney’s feed herself.

  Pressing a fistful of tissues to her ear, Cydney collapsed in the services manager’s ergoform. The office was small and mostly walled with screens. Each one depicted a different part of the habitat. A soycloud dropped its intake tube into Olbers Lake. People were coming out of their homes in the Branson Habs, staring upwards.

  “If … if your demands aren’t met, are you going to follow through on your threats?”

  “I already am,” Shoshanna said.

  “Huh? … Oh.” Cydney gulped. “It should have been getting light by now. You’ve disabled the sun mirrors.”

  “Switched them to ThirdLight settings. It’ll get a bit lighter than this, but not much.”

  “What … what else can you do from here?”

  “I’m still finding out.”

  Cydney’s ear throbbed. The taste of vomit soured her mouth. She subvocalized, ~I … I’m gonna sign off for a few. Need to get medical assistance. But stay accessed for more drama here in the Bellicia ecohood on 4 Vesta!”

  “Make that hostage drama,” Shoshanna said, smiling at her.

  ★

  Elfrida fell back in her ergoform. She felt as shaken and horrified as Cydney must surely be herself. “This is beyond crazy! Oh my dog, poor Cydney.” She rubbed her face with her hands, assailed by guilt that she wasn’t there.

  “Is she a personal friend?” Sigurjónsdóttir enquired.

  “Uh, yes. Yeah, she’s always kept it off the feed, but we’re kind of a thing.”

  “I had no idea. How awful for you.” Sigurjónsdóttir reached out and touched Elfrida’s arm. “Look, it’s going to be all right. The peacekeepers may not be capable of mounting an effective response, but our security corps will handle it. We’ve got several highly capable phavatars in the habitat. I’m confident that they’ll defuse the situation without loss of life or, er, further injury to anyone.”

  “I guess you’re still not going to let me go.”

  “I’m afraid that equation hasn’t changed, no. But in light of your emotional distress, we’ll certainly do everything possible to make your stay here comfortable.”

  Elfrida grimaced. “In that case, can I plug my immersion kit in and get some work done?”

  ★

  There was nothing she could do for Cydney. But she could do her job. She’d been away from her desk for four sols, and work had piled up like the Matterhorn in her inbox.

  After reasoning with Sigurjónsdóttir—OK, wheedling, begging, and bluffing that she knew someone on the President’s Advisory Council—she got permission to use her immersion kit for a telepresence session. The Big Dig undoubtedly had proper telepresence equipment, but they weren’t about to let her use that. So she was stuck with a onetime password for the wifi, and as much sensory realism as a S5,000 gaming setup could provide.

  “Before you slap me,” she said to Petruzzelli, “I ought to warn you that I can’t feel anything. I can see and hear. That’s all. I’ve got limited data transfer capability and the bare minium of sensory feedback.”

  “Well, what a disappointment,” Petruzzelli said. “I was looking forward to punching you in the kisser when you finally deigned to show up.” She grinned.

  Petruzzelli was wearing an EVA suit, her blue hair flattened by the helmet she’d just taken off. When Elfrida pinged her, she’d been outside, checking recently-loaded cargo against the manifests, she explained—a job that would normally fall to someone much lowlier than the captain. She peeled her suit off and stowed it in the quarterdeck locker. Turning back to the phavatar, she said, “I doubt that suit could feel it even if I did hit y
ou. We fixed it, but for ‘fixed,’ read ‘restored basic functionality’ …”

  Elfrida grimaced. “I’m really sorry—”

  “Blistering barnacles, please don’t do that.”

  “Memo to self. Do not attempt any expressions. No, I should have checked in with you long before this, and I apologize. But I’ve been out of the office. Have you seen what’s happening on 4 Vesta?”

  The Kharbage Collector was now half a million kilometers from Vesta, trucking between isolated asteroid settlements, dropping off consumables and picking up recycling.

  “Yeah!” Petruzzelli said. “Are those students loony? Or are they just completely unfamiliar with the concept of tightly coupled systems? I’m Earthborn, and even I know that you do not screw with the life-support functions of your own damn habitat. Just. No. That stuff is way too easy to fuck up, and one little fuck-up is all it takes to make a very bad day in space.”

  Elfrida gulped, feeling hollow at this reminder of the danger Cydney was in.

  “In fact, an asteroid is just like a big spaceship. But with less redundancy.” Petruzzelli ushered Elfrida out of the quarterdeck. “Everyone’s down in engineering. Let’s go up to the bridge so we can talk in peace.”

  Elfrida flailed her way up the zip tube that ran the length of the Collector’s 150-meter keel. Transferring from the keel tube to the elevator was always a challenge on a Startractor. Petruzzelli had to manhandle the phavatar’s clumsy frame into one of the two apertures in the rotating transfer point.

  “Did you even get my emails?”

  “Not until just now,” Elfrida apologized. “I haven’t been able to check—”

  Spin gravity took hold, and Elfrida thumped to the floor of the elevator. Petruzzelli landed lightly beside her.

  “I pinged you like twenty times. They rejected my application for compensation.”

  “Oh, crap. I’m sorry. Did you fill in the form like I showed you?”

  “Yes. Well …”

  “Alicia.”

  “I said the phavatar was destroyed. Which it isn’t, obviously. But they don’t know that. Anyway, we thought it was trashed. Michael managed to get it operational, but it’s still basically useless … as you see.”

  The elevator opened on the bridge. Elfrida stumbled out, and looked back. In the reflective surface cladding of the elevator shaft, she saw the tin-can figure of the phavatar she was using. Her head was a lump of mangled plastisteel and splart, with two steel lenses poking out, and a speaker instead of a mouth. The damage done by the pirates on 550363 Montego had not looked as bad as this repair job. “Wow. Yes, I do see. They shouldn’t have refused to compensate you. Did you attach pictures?”

  “Before and after.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t make any other mistakes on the form?”

  Petruzzelli balanced one knee on the ergoform at her workstation. Spinning around in circles, she said, “Well, I may have said that it was a čapek-class mark three, not a mark one.”

  “Oh. That’s it, then.”

  “There isn’t much difference.”

  “Except for about eighty thousand spiders on the secondary market.”

  “But they look the same. And after being smashed up by a bunch of pirates, you definitely wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. And I attached mark-three specs.”

  Elfrida shook her head. “They would know. They would look you up and find out that you don’t have a čapek-class mark three registered to this ship. Honestly, you’re lucky they haven’t come after you for making false representations. Alicia, you just can’t do that.”

  “Everyone scams the system,” Petruzzelli said tightly. She plucked a chunk of glittering asteroid ore off her desk and threw it from hand to hand.

  “Yeah, maybe, but … Don’t take this the wrong way, but did you really need the extra eighty K that bad?”

  Petruzzelli turned her gaze up to Elfrida’s lenses. “In all honesty? No spin, no corporate happy-talk? Yes.”

  “OK.” Elfrida had asked the question, but now that she had the answer, she didn’t know what to do with it. She did not, she realized, know what it was like to worry about money, to work for an outfit where the cash might literally run out. “Still, you should have thought about it a bit harder,” she mumbled. “They might blackball you. I might wake up one day and find out that the Kharbage Collector isn’t on my list of approved logistics and transport partners anymore.”

  “Dog! You think they’d really do that? Over one little mistake on a form? They didn’t even give me the money!”

  “I dunno if they would or not. But I get the feeling that the new procurement guidelines aren’t working out, so they might be in a contractor-firing mood.”

  “I wish you would go back to the old procurement system. It worked so much better when you were allowed to buy asteroids from us. You don’t even know what this has done to our cash flow. Our CEO is, like, selling ships to pay his kids’ tuition fees.” Petruzzelli thew her chunk of ore at the wall. It curved in the air and hit someone’s workstation. “A transport fee here and a phavatar leasing fee there is just, it isn’t shit. ”

  “I know,” Elfrida said helplessly. “I wish there was something I could do. But, I know this isn’t much, but there’s another fee on offer if you want it.”

  “I want,” Petruzzelli said in a flat voice.

  “I need to go back to 550363 Montego.”

  “What for? Those meatheads are sure to be gone.”

  “Yeah, exactly. And if they are, and the rock checks out, I can put in a purchase recommendation. Which would make a whole four recommends I’ve been able to file this year.”

  “This isn’t working out for you, either, is it?” Petruzzelli said. She frowned at her screens. “I dunno. We’re burning kind of fast in the wrong direction.”

  Elfrida was silent. She didn’t have access to a starmap, but the rate at which the phavatar’s coordinates were changing with respect to Vesta’s orbit implied a relatively slow burn. For that matter, it would make no sense for Petruzzelli to be burning fast when she had to stop every five minutes to pick up someone’s recycling.

  “Well, I guess if you’ve got a lot of other scheduled stops to make,” Elfrida said. “Or if you’re carrying passengers who need to get someplace …”

  The Kharbage Collector, in addition to multiple cargo bays, had a passenger module that could hold up to four thousand souls at a squeeze. It was the counterweight to the command module, rotating around the nose of the ship like a propellor.

  “Oh, no,” Petruzzelli said. “No passengers at all on this run.”

  “Then … can we do this?”

  Petruzzelli called up her holographic 3D starmap and climbed onto her desk, arching back from the waist so her head wouldn’t be inside the display. “Here we are, see? And here’s 550363 Montego, and here’s 6 Hebe, which is my final destination on this run. It’s in the opposite direction.”

  Elfrida felt talked down to, in more than the literal sense. “I know that. But 550363 Montego is also close, compared to 6 Hebe.”

  “Yeah, but changing direction eats a lot of fuel. And honestly? The fee isn’t worth the PITA factor.”

  Elfrida knew what Petruzzelli was driving at. And she felt as sad as her phavatar looked. She had unconsciously expected warmth and sympathy from Petruzzelli. Instead, she was getting treated like an ATM.

  It was her own fault, she realized. She never had told Petruzzelli about her relationship with Cydney, although she wasn’t sure why. She also hadn’t told Petruzzelli that she was being detained by Virgin Atomic at the moment. Strangely, that seemed to matter less than her reluctance to explain the whole Cydney situation. Anyway, her reticence had created a gulf between her and Petruzzelli, which as a recycler captain with bills to pay, Petruzzelli was quite naturally filling with wheeler-dealing.

  “Sigh,” Elfrida said. “How about this? Give me a lift to 550363 Montego, and I’ll help you refile that compensation request. To make up for t
he PITA factor.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. If you like, we can also apply for a hazard bonus for this trip, since you’ll be entering a volume where hostile entities have recently been active.”

  “Hostile entities? A pirate fanboy and his family,” Petruzzelli scoffed. “Anyway, no way they’ll have stuck around.”

  “I know. Actually, hazard bonuses are only supposed to be paid when there’s a high statistical risk of bumping into the PLAN.”

  “I never heard of anyone getting a hazard bonus from UNVRP.”

  “They don’t make a huge effort to publicize their availability.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty percent on top of the usual fee.”

  “Sweet!” Petruzzelli’s eyebrow smileys suddenly turned pink and happy. “I’d kiss you, if you didn’t look like the love child of a cyborg and an industrial accident.”

  Elfrida smiled sadly, which made Petruzzelli shudder.

  She despised herself for bending the rules to pay Petruzzelli off. But—she thought, lying in her capsule in the Big Dig, while Petruzzelli altered the Kharbage Collector’s course, up to her elbows in stars—you had to put it in perspective. Virgin Atomic was breaking a whole raft of laws about stakeholder disclosure and transparency, and that was just the infractions Elfrida had found out about so far. If a big corporation could do that and get away with it, why shouldn’t Petruzzelli be able to scam the system, too? There was nothing (Elfrida insisted to herself) morally wrong about fixing her up with a little sweetener.

  xviii.

  Elfrida marched up to Sigurjónsdóttir and held out a memory crystal. “Here’s the record of my session, like I promised.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry we had to insist on this, but …”

  “Information security. I get it.”

  One of the reasons Elfrida had explicitly criticized Petruzzelli was because she knew she’d have to hand over a copy of the data dump to Sigurjónsdóttir later. Not that the VA stakeholder relations coordinator had any power to get either her or Petruzzelli in trouble, but still, it was important to stay clean on the record. She was confident she hadn’t said anything that could be construed as breaking the rules. And the hazard bonus was technically allowable, just.