“Goto, do you copy? This is Sikorsky.” The captain’s voice crackled from her belt. She had been given a working two-way radio. “We are waiting for you. What are you doing, powdering your nose? Hurry up, please.”
“Yes sir, coming, right away,” Elfrida babbled in response to these, the first words the captain had ever spoken to her personally.
Hardy, however, was in no hurry. “Why?” he asked, sitting on the floor with his legs splayed, an undamaged UV panel flickering beneath his crotch. “Why’d they attack us?”
Elfrida could have given any number of answers. They’re the PLAN and that’s what they do. Or: We were a big fat unarmed target and the Cheap Trick was away. Or, more speculatively: Maybe the PLAN wants to stop the Venus Remediation Project. But she was exhausted and nauseated and the captain had just told her off, and so she said meanly, “Maybe they knew you were here.”
xi.
Inasmuch as the PLAN had any discernible war aim—if, indeed, this conflict was a war, rather than a terror campaign—it was the extermination of purebloods. The PLAN slaughtered them by preference, favoring targets where pureblood populations were known to reside. This went a long way towards explaining why it was now virtually taboo to ask anyone about their heritage. Though it would have been infamous for the UN and its allies to promote intermarriage explicitly in order to do the PLAN’s job for them, it was hardly necessary: that was the direction society was moving in, anyway. ‘Purebloods,’ even by the most generous definition, now comprised no more than 25% of the non-Chinese population.
And now there was one less.
Elfrida stood, EVA-suited and tethered to the nearest stanchion, in the cargo bay of the Kharbage Can, 1100 kilometers above Venus. She opened her glove. She held a vial which contained the mortal remains of Jim Hardy. Those mortal remains which hadn’t gone into the recycling system, anyway. The tiny size of the vial seemed to give credence to the theory that corpses in space were processed with the sewage—a deathless rumor that had gained new life, in the aftermath of 47 fatalities among Botticelli Station’s crew.
Forty-seven. A staggering toll. But Hardy was the only one she’d known personally.
“Goodbye, Hardy,” she whispered, and shyly corrected herself: “Jim. I wish … I wish …”
She wrestled with the screw-top of the vial. Hardy’s ashes puffed into the void. Sooner or later, gravity would gather them back in towards the planet he’d loved.
It was painful to think how close he—and she—had come to seeing Venus face to face.
In the end, Botticelli Station had not crash-landed. The hydrogen hack had increased the station’s buoyancy enough to keep it drifting through the clouds at an altitude of 60 kilometers, with the surviving personnel all packed into Operations. The trade-off was that using the hydrogen as the equivalent of water-wings for the space station meant not using it to power the life support systems. Captain Sikorsky had ordered everything turned off, even the air. They had donned EVA suits and squatted in the dark, like Neanderthals before the discovery of fire, each one alone with his or her thoughts. Elfrida would not soon forget those hours.
She remembered, too, that when their ordeal ended, she’d felt mixed emotions. Relief, of course, but also a pang of disappointment. She would not be walking on Venus, after all.
Rescue had come in the form of a drone from the Kharbage Can. The recycling barge, newly returned from its trip to 11073 Galapagos, had blundered right into the one-sided battle between Botticelli Station and the PLAN ninepack. The Kharbage Can had been the larger ship Elfrida spotted on the autofeed. She could well imagine that Captain Okoli had jumped in with both feet, eager for some live firing practice. According to him, the Can had accounted for two PLAN ships, and the rest of the ninepack had fled, as they typically did when opposed by superior artillery.
After seeing the enemy off, the Kharbage Can had remained in orbit, tracking Botticelli Station’s plunge into the atmosphere of Venus. Although the crippled station could not receive transmissions, Okoli had read its Mayday signals and understood it was taking evasive action, not crashing. He wasted several hours trying to browbeat his astrogator into coming up with a course that would allow the Kharbage Can to burn into the atmosphere and scoop the station up in its grapples without killing everyone inside. This turned out to be impossible,. Acquiescing to reality, Okoli had settled for sending down a drone, followed by two of the Superlifter tugs that travelled with the barge. These indestructible little ships were equipped with rotors that enabled them to fly in-atmosphere like helicopters. They ferried the survivors safely up to the Can.
It was rumored that Captain Sikorsky, the last to leave Botticelli Station, had kissed the tortured metal and promised, “Someday we will be reunited … on Venus!”
Forty-eight hours later, it looked as if the station might be saved after all. The techies had gone back down in the Superlifters to work on the engines. Their battle against gravity, mass, and time continued at nerve-fraying speed, but Elfrida’s part in it was at an end. She had nothing to do on the Kharbage Can except take her meds and brood. That was another reason she’d volunteered to conduct Hardy’s funeral.
It was a symbol of their spiritual impoverishment as much as anything, Elfrida privately reflected, sticking the empty vial into her suit’s thigh pocket. What did it mean to scatter a few molecules of bonemeal into the vacuum? Would it really make Hardy’s family feel better to know that someone had stood in a cargo bay and said a few inadequate words?
“You weren’t an asshole, Hardy.” she whispered. “I’m sorry I misjudged you. And I’m sorry about what I said back there, you know, in the corridor. I wish I’d been brave enough to apologize. I just never thought … never thought you wouldn’t be around afterwards.”
After surviving his suicide attempt, Hardy had died in Operations while they waited for the Superlifters to arrive. Elfrida could not bear to imagine what he may have endured, alone in his EVA suit, as he realized that ‘the stuff’ was working after all.
“Trust the fucking UN to fuck up the simplest things,” she muttered in anger, turning away from the view.
“Actually, that’s a great epitaph,” said a voice in her helmet. “We could use it for all these funerals.”
Elfrida jumped. “Dos Santos!”
The manager stood at the back of the cargo bay, in the shadow of the overhanging roof. It was funny, Elfrida thought, the way you could recognize someone even in the sexless Lego-man silhouette of a standard-issue UN spacesuit. If you knew them really well.
Did she know dos Santos really well?
Did she know her at all?
The truth was that Elfrida had been avoiding dos Santos. Not only was she embarrassed about her inappropriate confession, she was uncomfortably aware that she’d seen dos Santos break several regulations and probably a law or three, as well. The older woman had to be concerned about that. Elfrida had been trying for two days to think of a tactful way to let her know she wasn’t going to say anything.
“I didn’t realize my comms were on,” she said lamely.
“Oh yeah. You transmitted the whole funeral over the public channel. People were cracking up in the mess. Smile.”
Elfrida cursed and fumbled with the controls on her wrist panel. She was used to manipulating suit functions with a blink or two and a whispered command. On Botticelli Station, everything had been connected to everything. But on the Kharbage Can, nothing was connected to anything. It was a very private-sector way of doing things, betokening a low level of trust among shipmates. Captain Okoli certainly did not trust the refugees from Botticelli Station. He had politely declined to let them access his hub at all. Elfrida was isolated in her suit like some 21st-century astronaut. She pawed at what looked like the right dial and switched to an unoccupied frequency. “Hello, hello?”
Dos Santos picked up the conversation without skipping a beat. “You missed your thirteen-hundred medical appointment.”
“I wanted to do this.�
��
“You need to take this treatment seriously, Goto. We each absorbed a dose of maybe a hundred rem. You feel better now, but that’s because we’re into the latent period. In a few days, you’ll start vomiting again. You’ll experience diarrhea, bleeding, cardiovascular collapse, and maybe death … if you don’t take those stem-cell transfusions.”
“OK, OK. You’ve scared me,” Elfrida said. “Smile.”
“Have I, Goto? Have I scared you?”
Dos Santos walked out of the crisp shadow of the roof and into Venus-light. She was not wearing a tether. Elfrida automatically felt for her own tether and tugged it to make sure it was properly secured to the stanchion. These tethers were safety-tested up to 2 tonnes. You had to enter a Morse-like sequence of button pushes to release them.
“If you’re not scared,” dos Santos said, “maybe you should be. Give it some thought.”
“Ma’am, I don’t understand.”
Far below, specks of light winked on the nightside of Venus’s terminator. Botticelli Station had drifted around to the dark side of the planet, and the Superlifters had followed it. The Kharbage Can was trailing after them, maintaining line-of-sight comms with the engineers laboring on the stricken station. Soon the barge, too, would cross into Venus’s shadow. The cryosphere smouldered against the blackness of space, Venus’s molten ground illuminating the clouds.
“Think they’ll manage to save the station?” dos Santos said. It seemed like a step back into small talk.
“I hope so,” Elfrida said. “I mean, it would be awful if they couldn’t. It would set the Project back years. And the cost!”
“You really are the perfect little space cadet, aren’t you? Unfailingly brave, loyal, and cost-conscious.”
No one had ever called Elfrida brave or loyal before. Nor did the words feel much like praise now. In fact, they sounded sarcastic. Unhappily, she fiddled with her tether.
Dos Santos walked past her to the very edge of the mooring plate. Terror blossoming, Elfrida lunged for her, then bobbed back upright on the dry-grip treads of her suit, feeling foolish.
“Weren’t going to push me over, were you?” dos Santos said. “Laugh.”
“Ma’am, you ought to be wearing a tether! That’s not safe.”
“This ship isn’t safe,” was dos Santos’s quelling response.
That was certainly true. The Can was a twin-module Startractor, serially refurbished but showing its age. Cargo Bay No. 1, like Nos. 2 and 3, was simply an open space between circular mooring plates threaded on the keel like slices of carrot on a skewer, behind the forward radar dome. Elfrida and dos Santos shared it with assorted shipping containers. Below their feet was the auxiliary craft dock, but it was empty, since both of the Superlifters were far away. If either dos Santos or Elfrida fell overboard, their chances of rescue would be poor.
“In a way, it would be better if the station couldn’t be saved,” dos Santos said, as if to herself. But she was not the type to accidentally leave her transmitter on. She must have meant Elfrida to hear that.
“Ma’am, because …?”
“In strict confidence, you’d be surprised to know how many people—highly placed people—think the Venus Project is a colossal boondoggle. If you were a fly on the wall in certain important places when the news of the attack on Botticelli Station broke, you would have heard champagne corks popping. Ironic, isn’t it? But it wouldn’t be the first time our enemies have done for us what we should have done for ourselves.”
“I know the Project’s got enemies,” Elfrida said in confusion. “But we can’t let them win!”
“The question is, what do we mean by victory? Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies,” dos Santos said, her voice soft, almost sad.
“Speaking of being your own worst enemy,” Elfrida said grimly. She punched in the code to release her tether. It came loose from the stanchion and retracted to her belt. She edged forward to stand beside dos Santos. Their toes were over the lip of the mooring plate. Two-foot fluorescent yellow script around the edge of the plate read: SECURE ALL CARGO BEHIND THIS LINE.
Dos Santos’s faceplate swiveled. “Goto, get back behind that yellow line.”
“Ma’am, you’re not my mother.”
“Ha! Feisty.”
“I haven’t had a chance to tell you … Back on the station, I did something really stupid.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’d better start from the end. Before he died, Hardy filed a complaint against me.”
“He did what?”
“Yeah. He went to all the trouble of requesting a form, while we were crammed in there without any air. It got queued, and I only found out about it this morning. He accused me of—” it made her stomach hurt even to say the word, “racism.”
“Are you kidding?” This was the old dos Santos, righteously riled up. “What on earth did you say to him?”
“I said—oh God, I know I shouldn’t have. But I said that maybe the PLAN attacked us because he was on board.”
“Oh, Goto. That’s just silly. They wouldn’t send a ninepack after one pureblood.”
“I know. But the PLAN aren’t even supposed to be active in this volume. There has to be some reason …”
Up went dos Santos’s finger, a plump pale blue sausage. “Goto, think. What asteroid in this volume did we recently find out about? With what kind of an unusual population? My guess, if you want it: that’s where the ninepack is going. We just happened to be on their way.”
“How--how could the PLAN have found out? I haven’t breached security. I’ve been using quantum encryption protocols.”
“Yeah, but where did our information about 11073 Galapagos come from in the first place?”
xii.
Elfrida scrambled up the keel tube to the transfer point under the forward radome. The transfer point was a small cylinder that rotated around the ship’s spine at 4 rpm. From here, two 100-meter gimbaled arms extended perpendicular to the Can’s keel, also rotating. A speed of 4 rpm in the transfer point was pretty much freefall, so that Elfrida had to flap and flail her way to one of the elevator doors in the cylinder’s sides. It irised, after some minutes, to reveal another cylinder, this one lying on its side and full of annoyed bodybuilders. Four rotations per minute delivered a very livable 0.8 gees to the hab modules halfway along the propeller arms. But at the ends of the arms, where the ballast tanks would be relocated to balance the ship in the event of uneven loads, that went up to an organ-crushing 1.7 gees. Perfect for weight-training, if you were a blue beret or otherwise masochistic. The bodybuilders liked to keep the elevators out at the ends of the arms so they could use them as gyms, and got irritated when anyone insisted on using them as elevators.
Elfrida apologetically swam in between them. The elevator fell into gravity, she fell to the floor, and—slow to regain her sense of balance—fell out of the elevator door, head over heels.
She tumbled into the vestibule of the command module and sat up with her head spinning, blood rushing back towards her extremities. She wiped someone else’s sweat off her face and set off at a run. No NO RUNNING signs on the graffitied walls of the Can.
It felt odd to be physically present in this ship she’d travelled in so often as a phavatar. She knew the trick of throwing your weight anti-spinwards when you went up and down the ladders, the smell of nutriblocks and adrenaline, and the aquarium echo of noise. She was not used to seeing the Can stuffed with her traumatized colleagues from Botticelli Station. Considering themselves a cut above mere evacuees, they refused to stay in the passenger module. They mooched around the bridge and congregated in the crew mess, looking for consolation and companionship.
Blue berets, driven out of their usual seats by the B-Station cuckoos, lounged against the walls of the mess. Elfrida said hello to Captain Roy. The refugees were monopolizing the big screen to make up for their lack of net access. It was showing, once again, the Kharbage Can’s own footage of the battle. A red circle highlighted a blac
k dot: Botticelli Station plunging towards Venus. Elfrida swallowed, not yet desensitized to the sight.
A flamingo-crested announcer updated the audience, once again, on the struggle to save the station. Thus Elfrida learned for the first time that the engineers were attaching a mass driver to the station, as if it were an asteroid. Their attempt to power up the attitude boosters must have failed.
Dos Santos will be happy to hear that, she thought.
“This is ridiculous,” Captain Roy said, shaking his head.
“No shit,” said the woman from Human Resources who had apologetically served Elfrida with Jim Hardy’s dying complaint. “We’re right here, we’re the story, and we’re having to learn this stuff from the freaking New York Times instead of our own captain.”
“You know what gets me?” said someone from Life Support. “The whole system is watching us. But no one is lifting a finger to help us. Two weeks!” He was referring to the projected wait they faced before they could be evacuated. “The Kharbage Dump’s got to come all the way from Luna orbit. There’s gotta be something closer than that. Where are our ships, huh?”
“You get what you pay for,” Captain Roy murmured. “And UNVRP doesn’t like paying for ships. Planetocentrism.”
A trekkie, one of Okoli’s officers, joined the argument. “Sure, there are plenty of ships around here. And they’re all hauling ass in the opposite direction. The only captain this crazy is Martin Okoli.”
Elfrida coughed. “I was actually looking for the captain. Do you know where he is?”
Captain Roy and the trekkie woman exchanged a look: here’s another one wants to complain about the food, the accommodations, the comms—pick one or all of the above. The influx of refugees had brought the trekkies and their onboard peacekeeping detail together like never before.
“Captain? He’d be on the bridge.”
“You’re not authorized to go down there,” Captain Roy reminded her pre-emptively.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 9