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

by Felix R. Savage

  He raised one hand and chopped it down in a sweeping motion.

  The St. Francis vanished. His limbs vertiginiously seemed to rearrange themselves into the sprawled posture he had, in reality, been in all along. He floated upright in his nest and pulled his eyemask off.

  Jun sat on one of the dusty consoles on the far side of the bridge, knees drawn up, doing his gargoyle impersonation.

  Kiyoshi froze. His voice came out as a croak.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you to wake up.”

  “I switched the sim off. You shouldn’t be able to do this.”

  “Sometimes,” Jun said, “I’m not sure myself what I can and can’t do. It’s probabilistic. I’m the sum of a bunch of bootstrapped processing clusters. My head is a coil gun, my feet are radiator fins, and my heart is a vacuum.”

  “We need to get you a body real soon.”

  Jun had said to Elfrida that Kiyoshi was too cheap to buy him a body, but he’d been kidding. The truth was that Kiyoshi didn’t want to settle for anything less than the best, and he didn’t have the money for the best, yet. That’s why he’d sold the thing to the University of Vesta in the first place. It had netted him S50,000, which he’d been pleased with until the boss-man had told him he’d been ripped off.

  “When this is over,” he began.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jun said. “Right now, you need to know that we’re dangerously close to maxing out our waste heat radiation capacity. I’ve reduced thrust just enough so the tokamak doesn’t melt. We’re past the flip point, decelerating towards 4 Vesta. ETA five thirty-eight six from now, 14:25.40 Greenwich time. I’m running a full readiness check on the Wetblanket system. I’ll deploy the hull maintenance bots to fix any mechanical issues. Meanwhile, the passengers are freaking out. You should go and reassure them. That’s the one thing I can’t do.”

  Kiyoshi uncoiled into the stale air. His IV line brought him up short. He unplugged it. Drops of fluid drifted towards the rubberized floor. Under maximum thrust, the apparent gravity aboard the Unicorn was about 0.3 gees. Since the Unicorn had not thrust this hard since 2280, the bridge was now strewn with objects Kiyoshi had lost track of years ago, from empty food pouches to a hand-sculpted scale model of Notre Dame that a passenger had given him. He remembered the Pietà in Elfrida Goto’s sim—life-size, staggeringly detailed, dominating the end of the room opposite the fireplace. How did she live with that thing?

  He rolled his sleeve down over his cubital port. “It’s weird seeing you here, that’s all.”

  Jun was tidying up the mess. “You can switch me off if you like. Just log out of the hub.”

  Kiyoshi logged out, and it was the housekeeper bot tidying up, scurrying around on gecko treads. Log in, and Jun was back. Of course, Jun wasn’t really there. He was a phantom, projected on Kiyoshi’s retinal interface by the hub.

  Kiyoshi felt stupidly relieved, and at the same time, disappointed. There were no miracles. There never had been. The universe was a dumb agglomeration of matter.

  “I just have one question,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you still an MI? Or …” He was really asking: Do you still have to obey me?

  “As far as I know, yeah,” Jun said.

  Words sprang to the tip of Kiyoshi’s tongue: So, prove it by performing readiness checks on the coil gun and the missile battery.

  At the last moment, he decided not to force the issue. I’ll do it myself, later.

  He left the bridge and braced himself to confront 63 frightened Neu Ordnung Amish.

  ★

  Elfrida jogged back through the de Grey Institute. It was eerily quiet. In the atrium, the water sculpture had changed shape. Taller and thinner, it leaned the other way. It was reacting to the train’s deceleration, which Elfrida could also feel.

  She avoided the residential corridor where the thing formerly known as Smith was incarcerated. It felt like skirting the tiger habitat at the zoo. She had the same feeling, redoubled, as she manually searched the computer at the shift manager’s desk in the support module. The Heidegger program’s icon stayed anchored in the corner of the screen, no matter what program she opened.

  Aha, this must be it.

  “Sharlene?”she typed.

  The phavatar operators lay immobile on their scattered couches. At the same time, the screen displayed a lounge area where a bunch of people were standing around, talking in nervous bursts of chatter that showed up as subtitles. This was a 2D representation of the Virgin Resources back office, the virtual space where the refinery crew coordinated their operations.

  “Sharlene?”

  They stared up at the ceiling. In their sim, her voice would seem to have come from the tannoy. A slender, beautiful blonde touched her chest.

  “Hi. I’m Elfrida. Remember, we met at the refinery? You, uh, threw a party for us. That was very kind. Do you guys still have access to your phavatars?”

  “Yes,” Sharlene said. Her voice was unexpectedly low and confident. “The missile, or whatever it was, landed in the handler yard. The impact wrecked the autoclave, but we weren’t directly hit, so we were able to escape. Right now we’re up on the hill behind the refinery, watching the flames. We haven’t heard from corporate at all. Do you have any further information or instructions for us?”

  “When you say flames, are we talking a house fire? Or …”

  “We’re talking Mount Fuji. Have you ever looked into the business end of a fusion drive?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Nor have I. It would be the last thing you ever saw. But just to give you an idea, what we manufacture here is liquid hydrogen. Also known as spaceship propellant. Fire doesn’t need oxygen to burn. It just needs an oxidizer, and unfortunately, several of the chemicals we use at the refinery fall into that category. So, what we’re looking at is a chemical fire that is almost as hot as spaceship exhaust. About 3,000 degrees Celsius.”

  “Is it radioactive?”

  “Maybe that explanation was misleading. There is no fusion occurring. No radioactivity.”

  Elfrida leaned against the shift manager’s desk. “Can you guys get down there? I’m informed that there’s an obstruction on the ringrail. We need to clear the track.”

  The phavatar operators conferred. “What’s the timeframe?” Sharlene asked.

  “As soon as possible. Because actually, the train is coming.” She stared at the unmoving operators’ bodies. “We’re coming.” What was the relationship between these lively people and their mortal carcasses? They had to care about them, surely?

  “We’ll give it a try,” Sharlene said. “By the way, what are you doing on the V-Express?”

  “Trying to stop your colleagues from destroying the solar system,” Elfrida said.

  On the far side of the room, a bloated cetacean raised both arms and gave Elfrida the thumbs-up. “Go get ‘em,” Sharlene said. “And if you get the chance, punch Satterthwaite in the kisser for me. I hate that smug bastard. He’s just the type to destroy the solar system because he’s having a bad day, or some shit.”

  ★

  Cydney slithered hand over hand down a ribbed hose that pulsated and jerked. Rain fell on her in ropy splashes, making the hose slippery. The person above her kept kicking her in the head and shouting at her to move faster. Clods of artificial soil pattered down on them.

  The hose was the irrigation pipe of the soycloud they had been riding. In normal times, it was used to suck water up from Lake Olbers. Now they were using it as an emergency escape route.

  When the STEM guys hit one of the other soyclouds with a rocket, it had crashed into theirs. The combined weight of two soyclouds was too much for one set of PHES thrusters to hold up, especially since the PHES had already been failing: thermal updrafts had been few and far between since Shoshanna switched off the sun.

  The grotesquely mated soyclouds had lurched into an uncontrolled descent, from a height of 2,000 meters.

  Sho
shanna had kept her head. Cydney had to give the bitch that. Before they were hit, she’d already been maneuvering the other soyclouds underneath theirs, to shield them from the rockets. She had completed that maneuver while they fell. Now, their soycloud was the top layer in a swaying stack of green pancakes. Resting on each other’s treetops, they continued to sink, but more slowly, thrusting in unison for all they were worth. The idea was to slow down their descent enough that they would land on the ground, rather than crash. It might have been smarter to stay on the top soycloud and wait, but someone had panicked and dashed for the irrigation pipe, and a stampede ensued.

  It was nearly dark in the shadow of the soycloud overhead, so Cydney didn’t see the ground until she touched it. Of course, it wasn’t the ground. It was the next soycloud down. People scurried for the maintenance access hatch that led to the next irrigation pipe. She stumbled after them, her legs rubbery. Overhead, branches cracked. Twigs fell, and more rain. Their soycloud was settling lower, gradually impaling itself on the trees of the one below.

  The thought of being crushed between two soyclouds galvanized her. She shoved people out of the way to reach the next pipe. The Friends of David Reid had disintegrated into a bunch of terrified individuals. It was everyone for him-, her-, or zirself.

  She lost count of her descents. Some of the soyclouds were further apart than others. But the whole stack was compressing under the invisible hand of Vesta’s weak, but still-lethal, gravity.

  An almighty crunch drowned out the noises of friction and rain. The pipe in Cydney’s hands went slack. She threw herself off it, landed in a bed of cabbages, and floundered towards the only light she could see, a distant twinkling. It turned out to be streetlights. She was still pretty high up.

  Better to jump than to be crushed beneath the kilotons of soycloud that were sinking towards her head.

  She flung herself over the edge.

  She plummetted, too breathless to scream, for what felt like an eternity, knowing that these were the last microseconds of her life. They said your whole life flashed before your eyes, but it turned out that wasn’t true. She just wished, passionately, that she hadn’t been going to die before she got a chance to break what would have been the biggest story of her career.

  ★

  Elfrida pinged ‘Captain James T. Kirk.’ Kiyoshi Yonezawa didn’t answer, so she left a message: “The phavatar operators are trying to clear the track. Get back to me.” Then she sat down on the carpet behind the shift manager’s desk.

  She knew that she should go back to the driver’s cab and see how Mendoza was doing. But she quailed at the thought of another trip through the unearthly silence of the de Grey Institute. She imagined Satterthwaite and all his people infected with the Heidegger program, shambling along the ramps in search of raw material for DIY augmentations, intent on becoming … what?

  She decided to check her email.

  ★

  Cydney couldn’t see. Her eyes burned. She struck out with her limbs and encountered gluey resistance. Was this what being dead felt like? Her grandmother, a pureblood Xhosa with a face like a lump of coal, used to frighten her with stories about the torments of Hell that awaited spoilt little girls. Cydney seemed to feel fiends jabbing pitchforks into her flesh right now. She opened her mouth to scream, and a watery soup of algae rushed down her throat, choking her.

  She had bellyflopped from a height of 150 meters into the middle of Olbers Lake.

  Consciousness fled. Her last thought was that she’d be the laughing-stock of the entire mediasphere if it got out that she had contrived to die in outer space by drowning.

  Her next thought was: I’m still alive

  She was floating on her back. Bellicia’s six moon-windows glimmered above. Rills of black water trailed from her fingers and toes through the mat of algae that covered the lake. She was moving. No, being towed through the water.

  She raised a weak hand to the arm locked under her jaw. She touched sleek wet fur.

  “Hold on,” panted Big Bjorn. “Almost there.”

  Cydney tried to speak, but her teeth chattered so much that she couldn’t get any words out. In the end, she just relaxed and let him tow her shorewards. Bears were good swimmers.

  ★

  Elfrida skimmed the messages in her inbox. A lot of them came from her supervisor, Jake Onwego. She started to gaze-type a reply, then changed her mind and deleted it. Onwego couldn’t help her now, and she wasn’t going to give him any extra material he could use to cover his ass.

  Instead, she wrote to her parents.

  Mom, Dad: Guess what, I’m having another ‘adventure.’ I dunno, these things just seem to happen to me. Smile. Anyway, I just want you to know that even though I haven’t been the best daughter, I not to worry if you see anything on the news about 4 Vesta. Whatever they’re saying, it’s probably not true, and it can’t be a tenth as crazy as what’s really happening. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home! Love, Ellie.

  That would do: short and sweet. After she sent it, she remembered what she’d heard about ISA censorship technology. She’d actually heard most of it from her mother, who was quite the foilhat for a middle-class, middle-aged lady.

  Would her email ever reach them?

  Well, if it didn’t, there was nothing she could do about it.

  She leaned back and took in the silence. She ate a protein bar and drank some apple juice she found in a drawer of the shift manager’s desk, which made her hungrier and thirstier than ever. Only then did she look at the rest of her unread emails.

  From: Alicia Petruzzelli [IDstring]

  To: Elfrida Goto [IDstring]

  Hey, Elfrida. I hope you get this! Sounds like the excrement is really hitting the ventilation device where you are. Hope you’re OK. Anyway, I just wanted to warn you about this guy named Kiyoshi Yonezawa, from 11073 Galapagos. He may try to contact you regarding the situation on 550363 Montego. Be warned. He is not to be trusted.

  How do I know? Well, as you may have guessed, Kharbage LLC has access to certain proprietary databases and gated corporate domains that the average data-miner can’t get into. And did you know that several of the supermajors maintain dossiers on purebloods? Yup. Total privacy invasion, but they do (insurance for their trillion-spider capex programs). And Yonezawa is in there. You can’t hide trace DNA from sniffers illegally installed at spaceports pretty much everywhere that the supermajors have a financial interest, which is, well, pretty much everywhere. I hope I’m not destroying your faith in the private sector. Sarcastic grin.

  Anyway, have a look at the attached map, which represents Yonezawa’s movements going back to 2281. I think you’ll agree that the guy is not on our side.

  Elfrida pinched the map open.

  Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s journeys formed a spidery mandala of guilt. She touched play and watched them traced in one by one chronologically. Over the last seven years, he had made not one, not a few, but scores of trips to 6 Hebe, the ITR hub and entrepot that spent most of its orbit on the edge of Gap 2.5.

  Just in case Elfrida couldn’t put two and two together, Petruzzelli concluded her message:

  It’s pretty obvious that 6 Hebe is not his final destination. I mean, if he’s just buying water, why come all the way out here? Based on the date-stamps and the specs of his truck, he travels onwards for a few million klicks each time before returning to 11073 Galapagos—or more recently, not. I won’t commit any further speculations to the record, but I guess you know what I’m not saying.

  So my advice is, don’t talk to the guy. I actually think the authorities ought to be informed. It might sound better coming from you than me, but I’ll leave that up to your judgment.

  Hugs, Alicia

  Elfrida closed her comms program. She felt sick. Stupid. And above all, betrayed.

  Then she grabbed the side of the shift manager’s desk, gasping.

  But it was not her rage at Kiyoshi Yonezawa that had brought her heart into her throat. The train had jolted
. A low klaxon hooted. The Vesta Express crawled on for a few seconds, and then halted.

  Mendoza’s voice crackled over the tannoy.

  “As you may have noticed, we’ve stopped. Feel free to get out and stretch your legs. Sarcasm.”

  ★

  Shoshanna stood on the deck of her crippled soycloud. Her jumpsuit was soaking, stained with grass and manure, and a cut on her scalp bled into her eyes. It didn’t matter. She had no one to impress anymore. She stood alone, like a figurine on a divorce cake, atop the teetering stack of soyclouds that now floated on Olbers Lake.

  Everyone else was dead, she figured. They’d run, ignoring her warnings that running was nearly always the stupid thing to do.

  That said, she’d have to make her own exit soon. The soycloud stack was gradually sinking, as the lowest ones got saturated with water. She couldn’t remember how deep Olbers Lake was. The stack would probably topple before it sank, anyway. It was precariously balanced, the deck yawing under her feet, and none of the PHES thrusters were working anymore.

  People milled under the streetlights of Olbers Circle. Some waded in the lake as if hoping to reach survivors. Shoshanna frowned. She remotely accessed Facilities Management and turned the streetlights off.

  Then she picked up the encrypted call that was blinking in her HUD.

  “No one puts Harry T. Persson on hold,” a gravelly voice said in her head. “No one.”

  “Sorry,” Shoshanna said. “I was busy.”

  It took sixteen minutes for her response to reach the Virgin Atomic CEO and his answer to get back to her. During that interval, she climbed down the outside of the stack of soyclouds, rappelling on the vines and roots that trailed from their edges. For a spaceborn woman who’d been manually docking cargoes in hard vacuum at the age of ten, this was a piece of cake. It wouldn’t have been that tricky even for an Earthborn human. The others should have waited.

  She slid into the water and swam towards shore, arching out of the water at each stroke, like a flying fish.

  “I’ve filed suit against the ISA for destruction of property and reckless endangerment of life,” Persson said. “I’m seeking S12 billion in compensation. That figure may rise. The family of Jay Macdonald has initiated criminal proceedings under the jurisdiction of the Interplanetary Court of Justice. They have also filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. To come will be thousands of individual claims for compensation from the people you’ve subjected to unnecessary danger and stress. If the money doesn’t mean anything to you, think about the reputational hit your agency will take. The ISA is already besieged by privacy campaigners and transparency activists who claim that you’re a law unto yourselves. This is going to reinforce their case. In fact, I see it as a game-changer. For the first time, the UN will be compelled to admit that its efforts to control the private sector are blundering and destructive. Big changes will flow from this, changes that reduce the role of the UN in the asteroid belt and the outer system. And you will be responsible for that.”