Elfrida nodded. “You know, it looks like Wrightstuff, Inc., is going to end up getting what they wanted all along.”
“Sovereignty.”
“The Republic of Mercury,” Elfrida said acidly. “Of course, they’ll have to share the He3 under a UN-mediated agreement. And the health inspectors will probably insist on some big changes in their lifestyle. Not least, an end to their cloning program. But Grumpy Doug—whoops, I forgot, he’s changed his name; George—is cool with that. He’s also planning to resurrect President Doug’s parraterraforming project. He thinks the private sector is getting the message that there’s more money to be made from putting people in space, than from taking resources out of space, although the two things aren’t incompatible, of course.” She sighed. “Oh, and did I mention? He’s adopted Jake Vlajkovic-Gates and his baby sister. Also, Wrightstuff, Inc. took in all the survivors from UNVRP HQ. I would have thought most of them would want to leave the planet. But they’re staying. I guess it really is their home.”
“But what about Cydney?”
“Oh.” Elfrida grimaced. “She’s shutting down her feed. You know, her father’s a politican. He basically runs Xhosaland. So she’s joining the family business, and they’re setting up a joint venture with the Dougs.”
“What kind of a joint venture?”
“Tourism.”
Mendoza laughed. Elfrida smiled and shrugged. Breaking up with Cydney hadn’t been as hard as she would have expected. Their relationship had been a casualty of the Mercury Rebellion, as people were now calling it.
The story had been framed to minimize political blowback. And Cydney had played a key role in the media narrative that cast Mike Vlajkovic as the arch-villain of the piece. Angelica Lin had not earned the post-humous opprobrium that dos Santos had predicted for her. In fact, she’d been reduced to a tragic footnote. The only victim that people really cared about was Zazoë Heap.
“I bet Cydney was paid off by someone,” Mendoza said. “The UN probably has an entire agency for that kind of thing. Carpets, Sweeping Under, Department Of.”
“Don’t talk about carpets,” Elfrida said sadly.
Seagulls whirled past the plaza, screeching. Down on the Hudson River, the wind tore at the furled sails of fishing boats returning to harbor under electric power.
“And the Venus Project? Is it really dead?” Mendoza said.
“Yes,” Elfrida said. “This was one disaster too many. Oh, Vesta will hit Venus eighteen years from now, as scheduled. A big-ass period on the end of humanity’s terraforming dream.”
She played an imaginary violin, mocking the dream she had cared so passionately about herself. But Mendoza saw through her bravado, and slipped his arm around her shoulders. Her eyes watered. Pretending it was the wind, she pulled away and headed for the coffee stall on the other side of the plaza.
“Good idea,” Mendoza said, following her. “Mine’s a latte …”
“With goat’s milk and an extra shot. I remember.” She ordered coffees for them both. “My crystal ball tells me that paraterraforming is the future. I guess it makes sense. It certainly makes business sense, according to Cydney.”
“Yup,” Mendoza said. “It’s all about the money.”
A smiling young barista handed them their coffees in St. Patrick’s souvenir travel mugs.
“You’re telling me,” Elfrida groused. “These coffees cost the equivalent of a day’s furlough pay.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t be stupid. Now that I’m living at home, I don’t need to economize.” Elfrida sipped her cappuccino. “Yum; this is good coffee, though. Almost as good as Dr. Seth’s.”
Mendoza went quiet again. He’d been doing that a lot on this trip, and every time, Elfrida tensed up, dreading what he might be going to tell her.
But he’d already confirmed what she dreaded most of all, and maybe there was nothing else coming.
He said reflectively, “It’s not all about the money. I shouldn’t have said that. There are good people in the UN, people genuinely committed to truth and justice. The fact that Derek Lorna’s going on trial proves it.”
“Going on trial doesn’t mean going to jail.”
Mendoza squeezed her arm. “That part’s up to you.”
Derek Lorna had created the Heidegger program, version 2.0, and unleashed it on Mercury. Elfrida knew it. Mendoza also knew it, but he couldn’t prove it. The Interplanetary Court of Justice’s case against Lorna rested on the souvenir Elfrida had brought back from Mercury: the head of Gloria dos Santos.
UN techies had cut dos Santos’s BCI out of her skull. Call records and other data stored in the device’s memory crystals yielded evidence that Lorna had knowingly supplied UNVRP with software upgrades that were, to put it mildly, defective. It was basically a product liability claim. But Elfrida would be giving evidence at the trial, and she was determined to tell the court everything she knew.
“I’m going to tell the truth,” she said. “I’m going to tell them it wasn’t defective software. It was designed to do exactly what it did, which was murder people. If that spoils everyone’s tidy little narrative, too freaking bad. Lorna is not going to walk away from this with a fine.”
Hot coffee splashed her fingers. She had gestured dramatically with her mug, forgetting it was not a pouch. Now the mug was empty, her coffee all over her jeans.
Mendoza picked up the mug lid and apologized to people nearby. “I have faith in you.”
“I wish I had faith in me.” Her teeth were chattering. “I’m afraid I’m going to mess up and he’ll get off.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“It sucks that I have to stay on Earth until the trial is over.”
“Life at Hotel Mom And Dad isn’t that bad, is it?”
“Things are kind of sticky right now.”
Elfrida’s impassioned email from Mercury had caused a lot of trouble for her mother. Add in the domestic tension from the revelation of Ingrid Haller’s double life, and the Goto household was not exactly a haven of peace at the moment.
“Well, you don’t have to stay in Rome,” Mendoza said. “You could explore Earth, for a change. I went on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Fallujah recently. It’s incredible. The shrine’s in the middle of the jungle.”
“John, why do you have to leave?” She hadn’t meant to say that. The words were torn from her as if someone had reached down her throat and pulled them out.
Mendoza walked away from her and stopped beside one of the telescopes overlooking Central Lagoon. She followed him.
“I just have to,” he said in a voice so low she could hardly hear him.
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because Jun asked you to?”
Jun hadn’t asked her to come. That still stung. Yes, she understood that she had to stay on Earth for Derek Lorna’s trial. But all the same …
The Yonezawa brothers had dropped her and Mendoza off at Midway. From that moment on, Elfrida had understood that Mendoza would be joining the Yonezawas again soon. Somewhere. In space.
She winced at the memory of that last night on Midway. Beautiful chaos in the docking bay. Black tech dealers wandering from ship to ship. Kiyoshi twanging on an acoustic guitar, sitting on the steps of the Chimera’s passenger module, sucking sore fingers. The smell of Russo-Chinese noodle soup. She’d gone on her knees to Jun, or rather, in him—his physical body was a spaceship. Take me with you, she’d pleaded.
But he’d said no.
“You know what he is, don’t you?” she said to Mendoza now.
Mendoza nodded.
“He’s an AI.”
“An ASI,” Mendoza said, barely moving his lips. “He’s still improving himself. He himself admitted that he probably qualifies as a super-intelligence now. Big surprise. He defeated the Heidegger program, version 2.0. Do you know … no I guess you have to be an IT guy to appreciate what an incredible feat of computing that was.”
“As super-intelligences go,
it was a newborn baby,” she pointed out. “Trapped in a suitcase.”
“Yeah, but still. He fought it on its own turf, and kicked its ass. To us, it looked like five seconds of cheesy special effects. But in supercomputer time, that’s the equivalent of thousands of years of warfare by attrition, cunning, and logic. He let me have a look at some of his data logs from the fight …” Mendoza shook his head in admiration.
She understood then. What drew Mendoza into space was the same thing that had drawn her, again and again.
Abenteuerlust. The thirst for adventure.
“Well, I guess you have to go,” she said. There was nothing else to say. “Where are you meeting them?”
He shrugged. “In the Belt.”
“OK.”
“They need a data analyst,” he muttered.
“Stop justifying it,” she said, punching him on the arm and smiling. That smile cost her more than he would ever know.
He smiled back gratefully. Offered her the telescope. “Look, you can see our hotel.”
Elfrida peered through the viewfinder. Tourists mooched around on the deck of the Plaza Hotel, a five-storey barge permanently moored at the Columbus Circle dock. “Looks like cocktail hour has started. Shall we head back?”
“Yeah, let’s.”
They joined the queue for the elevator that would take them down to water level. A slim humanoid figure, bundled in a pycnofiber jacket, came to join them. “Where are we going now?”
Elfrida rolled her eyes. “Hello, Louise. We are going back to our hotel.”
“You seem upset,” Louise 361AX said.
As a key witness in UN vs. Derek Lorna, Elfrida was subject to as many restrictions as if she were a criminal herself. She’d only received permission from the court for this trip by agreeing to let her therapist come along as a chaperone.
“I am not upset,” she gritted. “Got it?”
The robot therapist blinked rapidly. No doubt, she had orders to winkle out of Elfrida any information she could. But she also had patient-management functionality that enabled her to detect when Elfrida was in a bad mood. So now, instead of asking questions, she gestured in the direction of the Statue of Liberty. “This really is a beautiful view.”
“Louise, you’re a robot. What would you know about beautiful views?” Elfrida started. Mendoza put a hand on her arm.
“Mahal,” he said, a Filipino endearment.
Elfrida tensed. Then sighed. “OK. You know what, you’re right. It is a beautiful view.”
A view of Earth. The planet that had always been, and would now again be, her home.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN
THE LUNA DECEPTION
BOOK 4 OF THE SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES SERIES!
PREVIEW CHAPTER
THE LUNA DECEPTION
Author’s Note: This story starts on the same day as The Mercury Rebellion, the previous book in the Sol System Renegades series.
i.
Leaning on his maneuvering jets, the squadron leader jinked into a gap in the enemy’s offensive formation that did not exist—yet—but would in 2.1 seconds. The flash of a nuke lit up the cockpit of his Fragger, dimming his readouts. Gamma radiation washed over the ship, along with a burst of neutrons lethal enough to mangle human tissue at the cellular level. The enemy wasn’t holding back.
Neither was Frank Hope.
“On my go, release the nail bombs. And go!”
From the ordnance portals of all three surviving Fraggers, the volume-denial warheads leapt into the darkness. Guided by IR-tracking, they shot towards the enemy fighters closing in on the squadron in three dimensions. None of them reached their targets. The enemy’s kinetic cannon batted them aside. But the nail bombs exploded on impact, spraying shrapnel across a volume of several thousand cubic kilometers. Each ‘nail’ was a mini-bomb, filled with combustible foil that would eat steel like a space-age version of naptha.
Whoops erupted on the comms channel when two enemy fighters slowed down, drifting as if stunned. Worms of fire crawled over their hulls.
That only left eighteen, that the squadron could see.
The PLAN’s fighters, dubbed ‘toilet rolls’ for their cylindrical fuselages, possessed a stealth technology unmatched by humanity, which allowed them to go undetected until the moment they pounced on you and nuked your ass. Even during combat, they eluded detection. They showed up as ghosts on your radar, transient flashes of heat that should not have been able to go that fast.
Stealth overturned the basic fact about space combat—its predictability. Like chess, normal space combat was governed by rules: Newtonian physics and ship specs. A sufficiently powerful computer could predict the outcome of any given engagement before it happened. Stealth removed those assurances. It restored raw intuition to its throne.
Once again, you had to be a pilot.
You had to really know how to fly.
And it sucked balls to be stuck 2.1 seconds behind the action, forced to guess that much harder.
Frank pivoted on his thrusters and flew backwards through the fringe of the shrapnel field, slashing a path for himself with the hot plasma of his own deceleration burn. The other two followed. “That’s bought us some time,” Abdul gasped cheerfully.
The nearest toilet rolls would have to change course before they could pursue the Fraggers, and the ones already pursuing them would now have to detour around the shrapnel field.
We might just make it.
At that very minute, a startled gasp forewarned him of tragedy. Abdul’s fighter blossomed into a fireball.
“They’re still throwing slugs at us,” Vicky said. “Must’ve got him smack dab in the VASIMR.”
It was just the two of them now. “Hold your course! We’re almost there.”
Mars.
Nightside speckled with ruddy alien light, it floated in the middle of Frank’s optical feed. The PLAN—an unholy hybrid intelligence descended from rogue AIs and a lost Chinese space fleet—had conquered Mars back in the 22nd century. Humanity had gone through all the stages of grief since then: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and full-frontal assaults. All had proved futile.
You couldn’t bargain with an AI.
Couldn’t beat it in battle, either.
Thousands of Star Force pilots had died, over the decades, in this very volume, sacrificed to non-strategies driven by PR needs rather than military realities.
Now, finally, humanity (or at least a tiny portion of it) was getting smart.
Frank poured on the acceleration. Thrust gees immobilized him in his flight couch. All he could move was his eyes.
Black dots glided across the face of Mars. They weren’t enemy ships. They were much bigger than that.
“Vicky?”
“Yeah?”
“Next up, the orbital fortresses. We’ve shaken off those toilet rolls, but—”
Her scream cut across his words. Slewing his gaze to his IR feed, he saw her Fragger expanding into a dandelion puff of debris.
“Vicky!”
Silence.
Guess we didn’t shake them off, after all.
Tears painted his temples. But it didn’t matter. They’d all known, setting out, that only one of them had to get through.
Grunting, because he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs to scream his rage and hate, he hurtled across the void. There was a way through the lethal cloud of fortresses surrounding Mars. En route to this rendezvous with doom, he’d analyzed their orbits and found several holes in their coverage where a Fragger might slip through.
A Fragger.
Not a Star Force ship.
He’d flown for Star Force when he was a kid. What a clusterfuck. Thirty-year-old hardware running twenty-year-old software, operated by mouth-breathing eighteen-year-old gamers.
The Fragger represented a new paradigm. Sure, its VASIMR engine was less powerful than a standard fusion drive, but it was also lighter. And with that much less mass to push around, you could afford other new-tech
features.
The orbital fortresses loomed like tiny, irregularly shaped black moons. Effortfully, Frank moved his left hand to the button on the arm of his couch that would launch the payload.
The reason he was here.
The reason seven other Fraggers had already gone up in dust.
Dust.
Ha, ha.
The orbital fortresses continued their inertial dance. They hadn’t seen him. But a PLAN picket had. A dozen toilet rolls popped out of stealth mode and slagged his ship. In the split second before the Fragger disintegrated, he pushed the launch button.
“Fuck! Fuck fuck FUCK!”
“Cool it,” Vicky said, helping him off with his headset, gloves, and all the other feedback devices that had enabled him to feel as if he really were present in the Fragger’s cockpit.
The Fragger pilots floated in their telepresence center at the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, a space station orbiting at the L2 Earth-Moon LaGrange point. They vaped cigarettes to wind down and reviewed holographic reconstructions of the battles they’d lost.
“I might have launched my payload in time,” Frank said. ”I got close enough.” But he knew he hadn’t. His payload had been fragged along with his ship. “I was just trying to get a bit closer. Dammit!”
“Well, I launched mine,” Vicky said. “I know. 8,000 klicks out. What are the odds?”
“Non-zero. Good work, Vicks.” He pulled her in for a kiss.
His gaze fell on a screen behind her. It was a realtime view of Mars, a feed from the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point, which was as close as the PLAN would allow human facilities to exist. The Red Planet hung in the blackness of space, impervious to the dogfight that had just added S500 million worth of junk to its orbital retinue.
“It was the delay,” he said.
They cavilled, but they knew he was right. How could you hope to elude the toilet rolls, when you were 2.1 light-seconds from the action?
“This isn’t going to work.”
“It worked better when we just shot the payloads in on inertial trajectories,” Abdul said bleakly.
“Sure, we got close that way. But we never got down to the surface. We have to get the Dust down to the surface. And there’s only one way to do it.” He watched their faces, seeking understanding and acceptance. “Next time, we’ll have to go ourselves.”
The Mercury Rebellion Page 33