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

by Felix R. Savage

  The handler bot crashed onto the south rim of the cutting. The phavatars started running back towards the train.

  Screw ‘em, they’re only machines, can be replaced.

  Spooked by the boom he’d heard, Mendoza lunged at the propulsion systems console. He engaged thrust. The Vesta Express leapt down the track.

  O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig … Mendoza sat tensely at the console, watching the sides of the canyon slip past faster and faster. He wished he hadn’t flunked out of psephology. He wished he’d never left Manila. He wished …

  He noticed an alert scrolling across the life-support systems monitor.

  … on event! Click here for details. Click here to dispatch repair bots. Click here to learn more about emergency life-support options. Depressurization event! Click …

  ★

  “Depressurization event,” barked the tannoy in the kitchen. It confirmed what Elfrida had just heard: the explosive noise of an air mass meeting the vacuum. “Oh my dog,” she gasped.

  Meredith-Pike pivoted to Satterthwaite. “Looks like we’re running out of time. Are you going to be sensible, Jules?”

  “Sod off.”

  Meredith-Pike shook his head sorrowfully. “Remember, I didn’t want to do this,” he said, and punched Satterthwaite in the temple.

  Satterthwaite’s eyes rolled up. He fell over backwards, hitting his head on the microwave.

  Elfrida screamed.

  Meredith-Pike turned towards her with a dispassionate frown. His eyes had gone slitty, more like the eyes of a goat than a human being. Whatever the Heidegger program had done to his intracranial wiring, it had tipped him straight into the uncanny valley that Glory dos Santos had told Elfrida about, way down into the zombie zone between ‘alive’ and ‘not alive.’ His eyes were no longer windows to his soul. They were slit trenches in a clayey landscape that only happened to resemble a human face.

  Little Sister tugged on his arm.

  “Oh,” Meredith-Pike said. “Right.”

  He and she moved at the same time. Meredith-Pike punched Wang Gulong in the temple, his fist a blur, felling the big man before he could react at all, much less deploy any duan quan moves. He then snatched a bread knife from the webbing above the nearest worktop and slashed Wang’s throat. Blood sprayed across the kitchen. Little Sister didn’t bother with a knife. She merely pointed at Jimmy Liu. A laser beam leapt out of her stubby middle finger and burnt a hole in his forehead. He collapsed on top of his friend, jerking grotesquely.

  Meredith-Pike glanced at Elfrida. “Hope that didn’t shock you too badly? They were purebloods. That lot are behind it all, you know, pulling the strings of interplanetary finance, prosecuting a war that no one wants, using their hereditary connections and secret influence to set natural allies at each other’s throats. They have to go. It is unpleasant, I admit.”

  Little Sister dragged him out of the kitchen.

  At about this time Elfrida felt the tug of a gentle wind. Her jumper rippled.

  Her Space Corps training kicked in.

  In the unlikely event that a depressurization event occurs at your workplace, proceed to the nearest airtight room, compartment, or cubicle, and await further instructions.

  Elfrida threw Jimmy, Wang Gulong, and Satterthwaite into the freezer and tumbled in after them. The door had no handle on the inside. She pulled at it with her fingernails. Slowly, it swung towards her. Its flanges kissed the frame, and sealed.

  ★

  There were no pressure-seals in the architecturally lauded atrium of the de Grey institute. Shoshanna and Dr. James jogged along the spiraling ramps, through a gale that pelted them with potted plants, stress-reliever toys, lost socks, thermoses, tablets, framed photographs of loved ones—anything, in fact, that wasn’t splarted down. The water sculpture had slumped sideways, losing about half of its mass before the remainder froze solid. They trod on patches of ice. Dirt, dust, and fog obscured the air, generated by the sudden change in the air’s vapor holding capacity. Arachnoid repair bots scrambled past, toting sacks of splart.

  When they reached the computer room—Dr. James leading the way; he’d been here before—they found several bodies.

  Shoshanna checked them for signs of life, and found none, as she expected. The pressure was down to 0.6 atmospheres, with a corresponding loss of oxygen. That wasn’t what had killed these men and women, however. They were all holding hands. Their faces had a pink flush, regardless of their original skin color, and their tongues protruded from their mouths. They had self-euthanized, probably with the prescription tablets known as ‘peace pills’—which was something of a misnomer.

  “Now what?” she said, thinking hard.

  Before she could answer herself, her suit reported lateral acceleration.

  “Metalfucker! Someone’s started the engine. Is there a separate operator’s compartment? Is it pressure-sealed?”

  ★

  The answer was yes. On the downside, someone had pinched the rebreather and the rest of the life-support kit that should have been in the emergency locker. Eyeballing the cramped dimensions of the driver’s cab, Mendoza figured he had about six hours before he died of carbon dioxide poisoning, unless a miracle happened first.

  He locked the engine into maximum acceleration mode and slumped back, hands over his face. The St. Matthew’s Passion throbbed into his ears. He couldn’t catch a break, could he?

  After a few minutes, he did some calculations. Without a payload slowing it down, the Vesta Express could accelerate to Mach 4 in less than one full circuit of the equator.

  He blinked up his comms program. “Goto,” he said, trying not to hope that she was still alive. “Do you copy?”

  She did not answer.

  ★

  At the same time as Mendoza was pinging Elfrida, two figures dashed across the atrium, beneath the frozen cascade of the water sculpture. The wind pushed them sideways. Meredith-Pike stumbled. He stopped and projectile-vomited. Little Sister dragged him onwards, her short legs pumping like pistons.

  Not all the atmosphere had yet left the de Grey Institute. Given the small size of the breach in the airlock, and the volume of air that was trying to escape, it would take a few hours for the pressure inside the module to equalize with the vacuum outside. At the moment, the air pressure in the atrium was about half of normal—but that wasn’t zero. It was survivable.

  Hugh Meredith-Pike, however, was not in the best shape. He stumbled to his knees. Then he blacked out.

  Little Sister slung him over her shoulders and sprinted on. She, too, was suffering from oxygen deprivation, but her neuroware was able to wring the last drops of energy out of her muscles.

  She had none of her weaponry, but she had brought along a knife from the kitchen, the same one Meredith-Pike had used to cut Wang Gulong’s throat.

  ★

  “As you may have figured out by this time,” Dr. James said, “the thing was a fragment of a PLAN ship. Yes, I know. Don’t sputter at me. The risks, we thought, were not severe enough to preclude a cautious, fully sandboxed investigation of its capabilities. We hoped to gain a better understanding of …”

  He named several topics that were top concerns of the ISA, and another couple of items that were sore points with Star Force in its role of first responder.

  “Principally, of course, we hoped to gain some insight into the PLAN’s stealthing technology.”

  Shoshanna paused in her exploratory pinging of the infected supercomputer, her attention caught.

  The PLAN’s stealthing technology was perhaps the biggest riddle confronting humanity today. Not that 99% of humanity had ever even thought about it, but a rudimentary knowledge of physics exposed the riddle to contemplation—and ensured frustration. How did the PLAN get from one place to another without being spotted? They used fusion engines, as proven beyond a doubt by their drive signatures. Engines generated heat. Therefore, according once more to physics, stealth in outer space was an impossibility. A basic infrared scan could
find every spacecraft on your side of the sun.

  Except, neither infrared nor any other kind of scan could find the PLAN when they were in stealth mode. Their ships routinely popped up without warning, attacked human facilities, and vanished again. How the hell did they do it?

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s something we’d like to know, too.”

  She bounced up from her ergoform and grabbed Dr. James by the shoulders.

  “Did they? Find out anything about it?”

  “I don’t know. As I said, they didn’t keep me in the loop. But my educated guess is no. We’d have seen some patent applications by now. Please let go of me, Shoshanna.”

  “I want that ship.”

  “Fragment.”

  “No one has ever captured a PLAN ship, or even a fragment of one. They autodestruct. Nothing to study but dust. This is un-fucking-precedented. Where is it?”

  “Unprecedented. Exactly,” Dr. James said. “Taking into account everything that’s happened, I’m starting to suspect that the PLAN is trying out a new battle strategy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The space oddity wasn’t a fragment of a ship destroyed in an engagement. It was a plant.”

  xxxiii.

  It was pitch dark in the freezer with the door shut. Elfrida was trying not to cry, because her tears froze on her cheeks. Working by touch, she pulled Jimmy Liu’s sweater off over his head. “I’m sorry,” she babbled. “I’m so sorry. But I need all the insulation I can get, or I’ll die of hypothermia long before I run out of air.”

  His body flopped in her hands like an unprogrammed ergoform. He felt warm in contrast to the air in the freezer, but that was just an illusion. He was dead. As dead as Jun Yonezawa had been when she ate him.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  While she wrestled with Jimmy’s clothes, she also weighed whether to try to call for help. This was not the no-brainer it should have been. One of the drawbacks of contacts—one of the many reasons that consumers opted for BCIs instead—was that without ambient light, you couldn’t see a doggone thing. So she was connected, but blind. She remembered how the Heidegger program’s icon had floated in her field of vision. What if I click on it by mistake?

  Without a BCI, it shouldn’t be able to get inside her head. But what if it got into her contacts and messed them up? Then she’d be not only blind but completely isolated, without even the hope of calling for help.

  She struggled into Jimmy’s sweater, knew she’d never fit in his pants, and fumbled her way over to Wang Gulong. His clothes were board-stiff with frozen blood.

  By the time she got the extra layers on, she was cold enough that she decided to risk it. Her comms program was usually there. Praying, she—

  —remembered that Satterthwaite had had a flashlight.

  She scrabbled in his breast pocket with fingers that were rapidly going numb. Yes! She dropped the flashlight, cursed, found it again, and switched it on, blinding herself. The beam wavered over 5kg sacks of hash browns and kedgeree.

  She wasted no time blinking up her comms program. Rather than attempting anything fancy, she just aimed her gaze at reply to last.

  “Goto!?!” the answer appeared in text floating on her vision.

  “Mendoza, it’s me.” She was crying again for sheer relief, which made it difficult to gaze-type. She switched to her air keyboard, projecting it on the top of a box that held frozen mixed vegetables. She knelt in front of the box and peeled her sleeves back from her fingers.

  “I’ve been pinging you ever since the big boom,” Mendoza texted. “Where are you?”

  “I couldn’t see anything. Sorry. I’m in the freezer. It’s airtight, as far as I can tell. But it’s not very big. I think I’ve got a little while.”

  “Shit, Goto.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Driver’s cab. I’ve got about five and a half hours of air. Apart from that, nothing much to report.”

  There was a pause. Elfrida fought tears. They were on the same train, but separated by a vacuum. They might as well have been on different planets.

  “You’ve got the advantage of me,” she typed at last. “At least you’re not freezing to death.”

  “But you’ve got food.”

  “Ever tried eating frozen broccoli?”

  “Goto, I could eat my own doggone elbow right now. There was supposed to be an emergency stash of rations up here, but the assholes took it.”

  “Only you could think about food at a time like this.”

  “Just trying to keep it light,” Mendoza typed. Elfrida was silent; she’d known that. After a moment, he typed, “Shit, I wish there was something I could do. I hate to think of you stuck down there.”

  In the split second before the next words appeared, Elfrida hoped that Mendoza wasn’t about to say something sentimental. The thought surprised her. That she’d even had it told her that she was more aware of Mendoza as a person than she had known.

  “I’m accelerating the train to launch speed. Figure your friend’s plan is our only chance now.”

  “Oh dog, Mendoza. I didn’t get a chance to tell you. There’s something not right about him. I don’t know if this is a good idea, after all.” She hesitated, trying to organize her thoughts. Maybe the best thing was just to forward Petruzzelli’s email to Mendoza, but would he know what to make of it?

  “This. Was. Your. Idea.”

  “I know, I know, but it turns out that Yonezawa may not be on the level. He may not really be coming to help us. I think maybe he wants the Heidegger program.”

  Mendoza’s reply appeared before she even finished typing. “He seems OK to me. Anyway, what are our other options?”

  “You’ve been talking to him?”

  “Sure. Or maybe it was the other one. They look alike to me, sorry. He knows his shit. Brain like a supercomputer, as they say. Hang on, I’ve got another call.”

  Mendoza ended the conversation. Elfrida stared in disbelief at the last words. Why did she feel so betrayed?

  Something clawed at her leg. She squealed in terror and dropped the flashlight again.

  ★

  Mendoza’s other call was from Hugh Meredith-Pike, of all people.

  “Yo! Driver! We there yet?”

  Mendoza did not like wireheads, especially this one, but the sheer elation of knowing at least one other person had survived the depressurization event overcame his mistrust of Meredith-Pike. He typed back, matching Meredith-Pike’s bantering tone, “What, you want to stop for a bathroom break? Ain’t no service areas on the Vesta Express, buddy.”

  “Dog, and I was looking forward to a Big Mac and Coke.”

  “You and me both. Back on Earth, when this is over.”

  “It’s over now,” Meredith-Pike typed. “Well, pretty much. We’ve got the atmosphere back! The repair bots fixed the breach. You can come out of there. Then we’ll see about stopping this runaway train and getting the hell off.”

  Mendoza did not notice that Meredith-Pike’s diction was not quite the same as it had been. Nor did he think to check the life-support systems monitor. At the words we’ve got the atmosphere back!, one thought filled his mind to the exclusion of all others: Elfrida. He could pull her out of the freezer before she froze to death.

  He jumped off his couch and hit the DOOR OPEN button.

  Had Bob still been operating the train, the next moments would have unfolded differently. But with the supercomputer off-line, the Vesta Express’s mechanical subsystems had no smarts to deploy as a counterweight to human impulsiveness. With idiotic obedience, the door opened a crack. There was a boom, and it leapt open the rest of the way. The atmosphere in the driver’s cab swirled out, sucking Mendoza with it. He stumbled a few paces, gasping and wheezing, and then fell face down.

  On the network monitor screen, the latest systems status report faded, to be replaced by a representation of the face that had formerly been Meredith-Pike’s. His eyes swivelled, as if he could see the empty driver�
��s cab. “Ha, ha, ha,” he said thickly. “Fun.”

  ★

  Elfrida wrenched her leg away from the icy hand that had grabbed it.

  “Aaagh!” she screamed, and then, weakly: “Mr. Satterthwaite! I thought you were dead.”

  Satterthwaite clutched his head and groaned. His gaze skittered over the half-naked bodies of Jimmy and Wang. “Cold.”

  “Yeah,” Elfrida agreed. To her shame, her first reaction to Satterthwaite’s survival was: So I’ve only got half as much air as I thought I had.

  Her contacts distracted her. “Hang on,” she said. “I’m just going to take this.”

  “Elfrida? Daijoubu?” [Are you OK?]

  Elfrida’s jaw dropped in astonishment. “Rurumi?”

  She had completely forgotten about the moe-class phavatar. If she had thought about it at all, she’d assumed Rurumi had been left behind with the roadheader, and good riddance.

  “Hai, daijoubu,” she typed in wonderment.

  “Yokatta! [Oh, good!] This is really scary, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Rurumi, it’s scary. Did you just call me to chat?”

  “I know you didn’t want me to come. But I just wanted to see that cute little doggie one more time.”

  Elfrida realized that she had forgotten about Jimmy’s terrier, too. The poor thing was probably dead now.

  “Anyway, do you want me?” Rurumi asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you want me? I emailed you, but you didn’t answer.”

  “Rurumi, are you really calling me in the middle of a depressurization event to ask if I want to have sex?”

  “No! No no no! Gregor told me, if things get really scary, you’re authorized to operate me. So, do you want to or not?”

  Elfrida inhaled sharply. She sent a quick thought of gratitude in the direction of Gregor Lovatsky, who—unlike everyone else—had been pessimistic enough to consider the possibility that things might go completely FUBAR. Then she typed, “Sounds like a plan. But I’m not in a telepresence cubicle. So we’ll have to do this together.” And Elfrida would have to overcome her dislike of working with an assistant. With their lives at stake, she thought, she could manage that.