The Venus Assault

by Felix R. Savage

“We looked for you before we left the volume. We sent a drone.”

  “I’m not blaming you, ma’am. I’m not faulting your decision to go in, either. After all, I successfully retrieved the survey data.” Elfrida patted Yumiko’s head.

  “So I see,” dos Santos said, with a minute grimace. If she hadn’t been in a cast from the neck down, Elfrida thought, she’d have shuddered.

  And what else did you find? The question hung between them, unasked.

  “It’s kind of ironic, huh, ma’am?” Elfrida kept petting the head’s shiny hair, as if it were a cat. “I mean, the way things have turned out, we don’t even need the survey data. Now that Dr. Hasselblatter’s the toast of the solar system, nobody cares if he ignored UNVRP purchasing requirements.”

  Silence fell. Elfrida waited, quite calmly, for dos Santos to break. She knew she was being cruel to dos Santos, and was surprised to discover herself capable of it. The destruction of 11073 Galapagos had changed her, too.

  “But we saved those colonists,” dos Santos said. “In the end, that’s what matters. That’s the mission of the Space Corps, after all, is to protect and support humanity in space.”

  “Yeah, ma’am. That’s our mission.”

  The severed end of the phavatar’s neck was a cross-section of plastisteel spine and innumerable fiberwires. All these components were snuggled in a baby-blue gel, which was dribbling out, bit by bit. Elfrida pinched out a bit and rolled it between her fingers. “I guess it was the least we could do, huh?” she said. “Since it was our fault the PLAN targeted them in the first place.”

  Dos Santos’s gaze snapped from her lap to her face. “It was what?”

  “Our fault. That leak? Came from the Space Corps.”

  Dos Santos flicked out a smile like a knife. “That’s not what New York thinks. In fact, this is strictly confidential, but it’s starting to look like the leak came from Kharbage, LLC. What do you know, Goto? You were right all along.”

  “Who thinks the leak came from Kharbage, LLC?”

  “That’s confidential.”

  “Well, is there going to be an official investigation?”

  “No, but—”

  “In that case, with all due respect, ma’am, it’s just speculation. But I’ve got something better than speculation. Right here.”

  Suddenly, Elfrida wanted to get this over with. She stood up. Swinging the head by its hair, she went over to Windsor’s display screen, which was set in a gilt frame like an old painting. She now had access to the Can’s hub through her contacts, limited but sufficient to accomplish the simple task of instructing the screen to display a file she had created on board the Pearl Jam and stored on Botticelli Station’s still-functioning server.

  A starmap appeared on the screen. She tapped it, zooming in on a region of the Belt that included Gap 2.5.

  A red line shaped like a warped Z angled in from one side of the screen.

  “What’s that?” dos Santos said, her voice as still as her immobilized body.

  “It’s the ID search you asked me to run on the Cheap Trick. I ran it again while I was on the Pearl Jam.” Elfrida pointed to the last junction of the Z. “This is a dark pool owned by a shell company incorporated in Sierra Leone, whose biggest shareholder is another shell company owned by … yeah, well, a bunch of known players in electroceuticals, black tech, and people-trafficking. I won’t bore you with the details. All that matters right now is that their information security isn’t as great as they think it is. And our guy is one of their clients.”

  “Our guy?”

  “I’m coming to him.”

  Elfrida tapped the end of the Z.

  “This is an asteroid, or maybe a family of asteroids, known as 99984 Ravilious. We couldn’t find out anything about it, except that it’s been generating some really heavy signal traffic in the last few years.”

  She turned to face dos Santos. The other woman’s head lay motionless on her pillow. Her face gave nothing away.

  “There’s someone out there on 99984 Ravilious. Or something. And that’s our guy. The ID you gave me is only one of thousands that he, she, they, or it uses. In fact, the ID you had was a throwaway: it went out of service while we were running this search. Pop, gone. So then Captain Nikolopoulos called some people—”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, I think people he knows in Star Force. They analyzed the last six months of signals addressed to that ID—”

  “They can do that?”

  “I guess so. Oh, I don’t think they can actually read the signals without permission from a judge, or something.”

  “They should have to have a warrant even to get the traffic history from the servers. I don’t think it was friends in Star Force who did this for Captain Nikolopoulos, Goto. I think he called someone in the ISA.”

  The Information Security Agency (ISA) was the secretive UN agency that managed internet communications standards and encryption protocols—a narrow remit that it had transformed over the decades, if rumor could be believed, into a practically limitless watching brief. Elfrida’s mother used to wear a broad-brimmed hat whenever she went out, joking that it would make the ISA’s job a bit harder.

  If dos Santos had thrown the ISA’s name out there to scare Elfrida, she had succeeded. But Elfrida ploughed on. “Anyway,” she said, “it was interesting what they found. I mean, on the surface of it, it didn’t look like an interesting result. But in combination with the data we got from this—” a swing of Yumiko’s head, “it points to a really kind of shocking conclusion.”

  “Stop it.” Dos Santos tried to sit up. Unable to flex her spine, she went red in the face and pushed herself up with her elbows, this time achieving a few centimeters of elevation. “Just stop it, Goto. You’re toying with me. Pack up your little presentation. I’ll tell you what you found out.”

  She lay panting in the bulky cast. Chrome-hued plastic printed to fit the contours of her body, jigsawed with white seams where the segments had been nanospliced together, it made her look like a robot with a human face. The Kharbage Can coverall she wore added to the grotesque illusion. Elfrida shuddered. Initiative lost, she wanted to sit down, but didn’t want to look weak.

  “You found that none of the incoming signals to that ID were encrypted. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It didn’t look like an interesting result, as you say. But if you further analyze the source of those signals, you find that several of them came from 11073 Galapagos. In fact, they were sent by Yumiko.”

  “Y-yes, ma’am.”

  “Which is where it starts to look very interesting. And if you recovered Yumiko’s comms logs, then you found the corresponding call records, and you were able to confirm the content of those signals.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Anger came to Elfrida’s aid. “Once per sol, all the time she was on 11073 Galapagos, this dumb phavatar was updating that ID regarding the asteroid. She sent them all the information she could vacuum up. Including all our survey data. In clear.”

  Elfrida swung the head around so she could see its face. Rage filled her at the thought of what this smart-stupid machine had done. And it had had the nerve to call her a dumbshit, a zoo monkey …

  “I thought you were taking orders from someone else, but it was the other way around,” she told the head. “You were leaking information to someone else. You told 99984 Ravilious all about the Galapajin. In clear. And of course the PLAN was eavesdropping.”

  Dos Santos’s voice brought her back to the present. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, Goto. While I was operating Yumiko, I had a look at her comms logs. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.”

  Elfrida gaped, stunned by this casual admission. So dos Santos had known for a while that Yumiko was the leaker, and yet she’d tried to pin it on Kharbage, LLC!

  “You should have let me deal with it. There was no need to involve the ISA.”

  “Have I involved the ISA, ma’am? Is that why you’r
e under arrest?”

  “Technically, I’m not under arrest yet. That will change when the ISA gets here. I’m told they’re sending agents to, quote unquote, question me, on the ship that will evacuate the rest of the Galapajin.”

  Elfrida was shaken by the thought of dos Santos being arrested by the ISA.

  Especially if it were for something she hadn’t done.

  “I guess they’re curious about 99984 Ravilious,” dos Santos said. “The trouble is, I don’t know anything about it.” Her voice got shriller, emotional. “I didn’t even know where that unknown ID redirected to, until you told me just now. And had I known, I would have made sure to tell them to take elementary precautions, such as encrypting those damn updates!”

  Dos Santos’s sincerity felt like a slap in Elfrida’s face. If dos Santos was telling the truth, she was about to take the fall for an unknown third party.

  The gold-framed screen flickered, drawing their gazes. Since Elfrida hadn’t touched it in a while, it had reverted to Richard Windsor’s screensaver: the Can’s autofeed of Venus. Stately, cloud-veiled, the giant jellybean hung serenely in the darkness. It was the same sight that had comforted and inspired Elfrida during her lonely hours in the ruin of St. Peter’s.

  But now specks traversed it. Ships.

  “That damn planet,” dos Santos said. “We’ll never succeed in terraforming it. There are so many holes in the computer models, you wouldn’t believe. The Venus Project is a boondoggle, Goto. It’s a massive, long-running scam designed to put money in the pockets of assholes like our gracious hosts.”

  “Those ships; is that the ISA?”

  “No, dummy, the ISA agents are hitching a ride on the Kharbage In, Kharbage Out. Those are Martin’s Superlifters.” Dos Santos turned her head, the only part of her she could move, so she wouldn’t have to look at the screen. “Don’t you want to watch in the flesh? Everyone else is.”

  “Watch what?”

  “You were floating in space for a week, so I guess you have an excuse for being out of the loop. Those Superlifters? They’re on their way to salvage Botticelli Station. Third time lucky, maybe.”

  “No way! Wow! I thought they’d given up.” Elfrida pressed her nose to the screen as if it were a window. It was too small, the resolution too poor, to see what was happening.

  “I think everyone’s out in the cargo bays,” dos Santos said. “But you could probably see better on the big screen in the lounge.”

  Elfrida headed for the door. Halfway there, she stopped. “Ma’am …”

  “I know, I know, we’re not finished. You have more questions. I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer them, but I’ll try. Go on.” Wryly, dos Santos added, “I’ll be here.”

  xxxi.

  Still unsure whether she should have left dos Santos, Elfrida joined a crowd of other EVA-suited people in Cargo Bay No. 2. She just couldn’t pass up the chance to watch the rescue attempt. And she was far from alone in that. As dos Santos had said, everyone was out here, the crew of the Kharbage Can as well as the refugees from Botticelli Station.

  They could have just watched the feed in the lounge, of course, but with the media hyping the event, they had all sheepishly found some excuse to spectate in the flesh.

  There wasn’t any floor or wall space left to grip onto. Elfrida tethered herself and floated with the other latecomers in the middle of the bay.

  “Try Cydney Blaisze’s feed,” Petruzzelli advised her via suit-to-suit radio. “She’s got the best vid.”

  Taking the suggestion, Elfrida got a momentary, disorienting glimpse of the crowd in Cargo Bay No. 2, including the back of her own borrowed EVA suit. One of her colleagues must have sold the feed from his or her helmet cam to Cydney Blaisze, an up-and-coming news curator. They had probably done that because they feared they would soon be out of a job.

  The anonymous vidder had a better view than she did, closer to the mouth of the bay. Elfrida saw that Cargo Bay No. 1 was occupied by a ship, but not one of the Superlifters. That squared-off radome belonged to a Steelmule, a larger tug. It must have been dropped off by the Kharbage Dump.

  The picture changed to Cydney Blaisze, in her studio on Earth. Blonde and perky, Blaisze explained, “The first rescue attempt, of course, used B-Station’s own auxiliary engines to try to boost the station into orbit. The second attempt involved shooting projectiles at B-Station through a rail gun! Is anyone surprised that didn’t work?”

  “Oh, shut up,” said someone on the Can’s public channel who was obviously also watching. “It would have worked if they hadn’t had to abort.”

  “Now, for this third attempt, they’ve come up with a really fantarrific idea!” Blaisze displayed vid, filmed this morning, of the Nagasaki shrinking into the distance. “That is the antique passenger ship that carried the colonists of 11073 Galapagos to safety. Now it’s falling apart! But it still has a role to play.”

  I shouldn’t have left her, Elfrida thought. We weren’t through talking.

  In the corner of her eye, Cydney Blaisze babbled on. “Most people don’t know this, but back in the early days of spaceflight, they used to launch ships into orbit with rockets! Can you believe that? They would balance the ship on top of a rocket booster and fire it into space! Well, that’s how the salvage team are going to use the Nagasaki. It’s going to act as a humongous rocket booster!”

  “Thanks a bunch,” said the voice of a man on the Can’s public channel. “If we screw up now, we’re going to look incompetent in front of the whole solar system.”

  “Stay cool, Lomax,” said Captain Okoli. “It’ll work.”

  “Cross your fingers, Cap’n. We’ll be on target in twenty minutes.”

  “Can you see those dots?” Cydney Blaisze said to her system-wide audience. “One of those is the Nagasaki. The others are Superlifters, towing the antique ship on its final journey!”

  I shouldn’t have left her.

  I have to go back and—and make sure—

  Her resolve crystallizing, Elfrida reeled herself back to the floor of the cargo bay. She squeezed through the crowd to the airlock. Waiting for it to cycle, she bounced from foot to foot in impatience.

  She couldn’t quite admit to herself why she felt compelled to go back to Richard Windsor’s cabin. But it had to do with the way dos Santos had sounded when she urged Elfrida to leave her. You go on, go watch. I’ll be here—

  Reassuring Elfrida. Calming any doubts she may have had that it was all right to leave.

  That was what people did, when they planned to take the stuff, and they planned to succeed.

  The keel tube was thronged. The Galapajin had come out on the same idiotic impulse as everyone else, to get that little bit closer to the action. Elfrida shoved between them without so much as a “Sumimasen.” She waited for the elevator, and hurtled through the corridors of the crew module.

  The peacekeepers who had previously obstructed her entry to Richard Windsor’s cabin were gone. Come to think of it, she’d seen them outside, in their trademark UN-blue spacesuits.

  She crashed through the door.

  The cabin was empty.

  Dented pillows the only sign dos Santos had ever been here.

  “Oh my God, oh my God—”

  Spinning around, she caught sight of dos Santos’s face, and nearly screamed.

  From the wall screen, dos Santos waved at her.

  “Looks like you came back.”

  The vid had been taken mere moments ago. In it, dos Santos was lying on the bunk just as Elfrida had left her. She had a calm, confident look in her eyes.

  “I was lying about there not being any cameras in there,” she admitted. “I wanted to see what you’d say if you thought it was safe.”

  As dos Santos spoke, she twisted onto her side. A handler bot slid its grippers under her, turning her so she could sit up.

  Elfrida stood transfixed.

  “Well, you thought it was safe, and it was safe, though not for the reason you thought. And you
said your piece. And I’m impressed. You found out a lot. 99984 Ravilious … I would really like to know who or what is out there. Well, I’m sure the ISA will get to the bottom of it.”

  The helper bot levered dos Santos upright. Pain tautened her voice.

  “But they’ll have to do it without me.”

  Elfrida spun around, as if she might still spy dos Santos somewhere in the tiny cabin.

  Back to the screen.

  The bot was helping dos Santos into an EVA suit, a crimson and gold Kharbage, LLC loaner. At the same time, from somewhere around Elfrida’s waist level, dos Santos’s voice said, “I’m hiding under the bed … Joke, joke.”

  Elfrida still had her EVA suit on. Helmet in her hand.

  Dos Santos’s voice was coming from the helmet speaker.

  “I can see you on the surveillance feed right now,” dos Santos explained. “The camera’s in the chandelier.”

  Elfrida tipped her face up to the miniature chandelier. Meanwhile, dos Santos on the screen said, “I guess I just didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye.”

  “Oh my God,” dos Santos said from her helmet. “The look on your face. That’s so cute.”

  This was like a warped version of a time-delayed conversation. Two dos Santoses, one a few minutes out of date, one real. Elfrida brought the helmet up to her face so she could talk into the suit-to-suit radio. “You can’t leave,” she said lamely.

  “Watch me,” said dos Santos—on the screen, not from the helmet. She was on her feet now, supported by the helper bot. Shakily, she turned to face the screen she was now appearing on. In the vid, it still showed the autofeed of Venus. Supported by the bot, dos Santos’s hand slowly rose and gave Venus the finger.

  “That’s why I did it, Goto. And that’s all you really need to know.”

  “Why you did what?” Elfrida pleaded, talking to the screen in her confusion.

  “Keep watching,” said dos Santos from her helmet. “I’m going to explain.”

  On the screen, dos Santos stood in the handler bot’s embrace. The bot resembled a ladder on legs, with spindly arms that supported her under the armpits. Woman and bot looked like two robots frozen in mid-tango.