The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series

by Felix R. Savage

  “Sorry. I thought I had it under control.”

  “Where’s Emily-Francis?”

  “Trying to get the dynamite out of the shrinkfoam wrap. I swear, the first person who invents a better type of vacuum-proof packaging will be a gazillionaire.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing a spacesuit?”

  “Emily-Francis refused to give me one. I think she was under the impression that would stop me from coming outside.” The phavatar grinned. “So what are you up to?”

  “None of your business.”

  She glanced at his radar scanner. “Hmm. Has this rock got any defensive capabilities? I scanned the surface, but I couldn’t see merda. Just a few docking clamps. You got any ships to go with them?”

  Jun pointed his Kalashnikov at her. The fact was he didn’t trust her any more than he had before. His faith in the sacrament of baptism was less powerful than his belief that this thing intended them harm. “Like I’d fucking tell you anything, just so that you can tell it to the PLAN?”

  “Ah ha, ah-ha-ha-ha,” the phavatar said. “Don’t be ignorant. I work for the UN, as I’ve told you a thousand times.”

  “Same difference.” They were alone out here. No one was watching. No one would know any different if he said she’d misjudged her step and gone flying off into space. He shot her.

  Her hand was in front of her face; he hadn’t seen it move. She lowered it and opened her fingers to reveal his projectile. It was mushroom-shaped.

  Jun sagged. This thing was massively more powerful than he had surmised. The Galapajin couldn’t have restrained her for five minutes if she hadn’t allowed them to. “Point made. What do you want?”

  She tossed the flattened projectile into space. “I want to help you.”

  “We don’t need your help.”

  “You can’t fight the PLAN with Kalashnikovs.”

  “We’ve got mines, too. You can’t see them, but they’re out there in orbit. I just have to arm the proximity fuses, and nothing’s getting nearer than five kilometers.”

  “Which won’t do you a whole lot of good, since the PLAN’s preferred modus operandi is to stand off and throw nukes at people.”

  “We won’t be sticking around for that.”

  “Oh? I don’t see anything capable of evacuating thirty thousand people, unless those ships of yours are a lot closer than I estimate them to be.”

  “What ships?”

  “Oh, come on, Jun Yonezawa,” she said softly. “The St. Francis and the Nagasaki. With names like that, it wasn’t hard to find them. The available data suggests they’re beaters. Unlicensed, uncertified, probably a century behind current specs. But if they’re capable of smuggling water from the Belt, they may be capable of mounting a pyrrhic defense against five PLAN ships. If you’re willing to sacrifice their fusion drives. If they’re here.”

  Jun licked his lips. His suit flashed a HUD warning, telling him that his heart rate and oxygen consumption had spiked. He opened his mouth to deny everything. Then shrugged.

  “We’re not self-sufficient yet. We still have to import water, stem cells, a few other things. So, yeah. My older brother is in charge of the water runs. He’s somewhere in the Belt right now, praying for us.”

  Nine seconds. Eighteen seconds. The phavatar smiled. “I guess it’s up to us, then.”

  “Sorry,” Jun said. “But I don’t see how you’re going to fight the PLAN with a cutter laser. I guess you could try catching their nukes with your bare hands.”

  “Yonezawa Jun, I do believe you’re mocking me. But that’s OK. There’s no way you could know about my offensive capabilities. Even I didn’t know about all of them until half an hour ago.”

  The phavatar raised her hands. Nozzles projected from invisible ports on her forearms and spat streams of plasma that arced high over the cathedral, twisting as the asteroid spun. Jun’s radio lit up with panicky queries from everyone who was watching an external sensor feed, which was a lot of people. The plasma ribbons ignited orbiting particles of space dust in a concatenation of tiny fireworks, and lopped off the top of the cathedral’s highest spire.

  “Hey!” Jun shouted.

  Nine seconds later the phavatar lowered her hands. She was smirking. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “It was just the phavatar,” Jun told his people. “Showing off her offensive capabilities.” He felt immensely weary. Clearly, whatever the Galapajin did, it was because they were allowed to do it. How could independence ever be more than an illusion for them, in a universe that contained the likes of this?

  “I’ve also got attitude thrusters,” the phavatar said. “I can maneuver independently in space. And I’m supposed to be able to emit EM pulses strong enough to—”

  She stopped speaking, jerked epileptically, and fell flat on her face.

  xviii.

  A duo of trekkies hauled Glory out of the telepresence cubicle. She protested furiously. “I was in the middle of something!”

  “Sorry, dudette. Captain’s orders.”

  Glory seized a handful of dreadlocks and yanked. The trekkie to whom they were attached yelped and released her leg. She kicked the other one in the balls and hauled herself back into the cubicle. Looked around, trembling, for something with which to bar the door.

  There was nothing. Even on a ship as jury-rigged as the Can, it was not possible to barricade yourself in a telepresence cubicle. The trekkies dragged her out again, threatening to tase her if she didn’t cooperate. In her mind’s eye she could still see those ribbons of plasma twisting in space above 11073 Galapagos. She could still feel the headrush of power.

  Captain Okoli stood in dry-grip boots in the entrance to the dead-end where the cubicles were, hands on his hips. “I did not authorize you to use my telepresence facilities.”

  “For crying out loud, Martin. People’s lives are at stake.”

  “Yeah, and so’s my job.”

  “I have a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could you be any bigger of an asshole?”

  Martin Okoli raised an eyebrow at her and then clicked his tongue, enabling the voice transmitter implanted in one of his molars.

  ★

  Captain Okoli’s voice boomed into the crew mess. “Goto. Space Corps agent Goto, proceed to the engineering deck. Now.”

  Alicia Petruzzelli made an ‘oooh’ shape with her lips. “The voice of God speaks. No quotations, no jokes; sounds like you’re in trouble. What did you do?”

  Perturbed, Elfrida snapped, “Nothing. And I don’t think I can really be in trouble, since I don’t work for him.”

  “No,” Petruzzelli said. “But you do owe him your life. So I’d try to be respectful.”

  “Sure,” Elfrida said, pulling on the hospital flip-flops she had taken off to curl on the bench.

  Petruzzelli said, “You’re gonna lose those in engineering. Can’t keep flip-flops on your feet in zero-gee. Here, wear my slippers. I think we’re about the same size.”

  Her slippers were trendy Elephunts with sock-tops that came halfway up Elfrida’s bare calves. “Wow, they fit. Thanks.”

  “It sucks having big feet, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Sucks.”

  They exchanged a smile before Elfrida fled the lounge, wondering what Captain Okoli wanted her for. She could think of several possibilities, none of them good.

  None of her imaginings, however, encompassed the sight of dos Santos floating between two hulking trekkies, her arms restrained. The techies had downed tools to stare. Elfrida hugged herself; it was cold down here. Dos Santos, too, looked half frozen.

  Captain Okoli, kingly in black pyjamas, said, “Against my better judgment, I authorized you to use a TP cubicle, Goto. Not her. And I specifically ordered you not to tell her about it. What you got to say for yourself?”

  So he hadn’t summoned her to punish her for her theory about Kharbage, LLC’s duplicity. That was a relief. On the other hand, it looked like her other nightmare had come true. Dos Santos h
ad tried to help the Galapajin, and got caught.

  “Let her go! You’ve got no right to treat her like that.”

  “Like what, Goto?”

  “Like a prisoner.”

  “It strikes me,” Okoli said, “that a spaceship in orbit around Venus—the only spaceship in orbit around Venus—is the very definition of a prison. We are all prisoners, Goto. You’re the prisoner of your own unexamined assumptions. I’m the prisoner of something no more tangible, but by any standard more real: the math of profit and loss.”

  “You really are a heartless son of a bitch,” dos Santos said.

  “I got people depending on me, too. And I got strict orders not to let any UN personnel use the computing facilities aboard this ship. That includes telepresence.”

  Dos Santos’s lips twitched. Elfrida had a flash of insight: while she was in the cubicle, dos Santos must have done what Elfrida had promised not to do—gone digging in the Kharbage Can’s hub. What had she found?

  “I gave you permission to use the TP cubicle,” Okoli continued, “because, pace Glory dos Santos, I am not heartless, and you’re cute. I hit the sack for some well-earned rest. Then something wakes me up. Just a tickle. You get those after you’ve been plying the unfriendly vacuum for a while. That tickle tells me something ain’t where it should be. I turn on my screens and what do I see? Elfrida Goto. Not in sickbay. She’s vegging out in the lounge with my second mate, who needs to lay off the midnight snacks before she fucks her adrenals. Everyone else is asleep or at work. But one of the telepresence cubicles is occupied. So just who is in there?” He shook his head sadly at dos Santos. “I hope you had fun. Rest assured I’m going to be examining every second of the data dump.”

  “If you’re quite finished enjoying the sound of your own voice,” dos Santos said, “you won’t be looking at the data, because I didn’t dump it. I disabled the autosave function. It only takes a modicum of skill. Sure, you can check to see where I telecasted to, but don’t bother, I’ll tell you: 11073 Galapagos.”

  “That doggone asteroid.”

  “The one you took off Adastra’s hands for a song—”

  “Nothing but trouble.”

  “And now the colonists are in trouble. Do you want kilodeath on your conscience? If not, let me back into that telepresence cubicle.”

  “And how, pray tell, are you going to stop the PLAN with one phavatar?”

  Dos Santos scowled. Elfrida saw that she was stuck. She dared not admit just how special Yumiko was. How special is she, anyway?

  “You’re an experience junkie, is the truth, Glory,” Okoli said. “It ain’t your fault, but you were warped by what happened to you. Developed an appetite for destruction. You want to be in at the death.”

  “Oh, I’m not even going to dignify that,” dos Santos said.

  “I know your type. A Dante bent on seeing allll the sights, from the safety of a telepresence cubicle. Give me guts and give me glory, so long as I can log out at any time. Hell, I’ve got some of that ilk on board, myself.”

  The trekkies chuckled knowingly. Dos Santos turned white. Elfrida said, “How do you guys know each other, anyway?”

  “Oh, I’ve known Glory dos Santos a long time,” Okoli said. “First time we met, she was just a kid like you. Matter of fact, that was the first time I saved her life.”

  “Please,” dos Santos said. “You were just following orders, piloting a Superlifter.”

  “That’s right. Every ship outside of the Belt was commandeered to help take the survivors off Callisto. Remember that incident in ‘65, when the CyberDestiny crazies occupied the colony? They were killing a hostage every 24 hours. Then the blue berets rolled up to take the moon back, and wound up killing hundreds more. But not Glory dos Santos, and aren’t we all thankful for that?”

  Elfrida gazed at dos Santos with new respect. “I had no idea you were involved in the Callisto hostage-taking, ma’am!”

  “What can I say? I haven’t had the best of luck in my career.” Dos Santos won a chuckle from the watching engineers. “But that’s all water under the bridge now.”

  “It is,” Okoli agreed. “Still, it made an impression on me. I was young at the time, believe it or not. Could not wrap my head around the idea of a group that believed so passionately in personhood, they were willing to kill people for it.”

  Elfrida nodded. Personhood for robots was a perpetual fringe cause, led by intellectual poseurs and sad male activists who were a bit too attached to their sexbots. Their main activity was distancing themselves from CyberDestiny, the terrorists whose activities in the ‘60s had quashed any hopes the cause might have for the foreseeable future.

  “The cause has moved on since then,” dos Santos said. “Everyone recognizes that killing people is counterproductive. Anyway, we’ve got the PLAN to do that for us.”

  For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop. What they actually did hear drop, or rather collide with the ceiling, was a rivet gun. An engineer dived in pursuit, apologizing.

  “What are you guys working on there?” dos Santos said, casually. “The mass driver for the station?” No one responded. She raised her eyebrows at them. “What?”

  Elfrida was not sure what she had just heard from dos Santos’s mouth. Nor, evidently, was anyone else, even Captain Okoli, who said, “Yeah, that’s what they’re working on. Hoping to deploy it today.” He paused. “The question in my mind right now, Glory, is do I need to put you in the brig, or are you going to behave?”

  “If you mean, will I attempt to use the telepresence cubicle again, the answer is no. Your ship, your rules. And I think we all know now where you stand on utilizing your resources for humanitarian purposes.”

  Okoli did not rise to the bait. “All right, I’ll accept that. However, you are confined to the passenger module until further notice.”

  Elfrida interjected urgently, “Can I use the telepresence facilities? Sir?”

  Okoli turned on her with a wrathful expression. “What are you thinking, this didn’t happen? That is a no, Goto. You don’t work for me, so I can’t teach you how to think for yourself. But I can teach you a little bit about consequences.” He shooed her out of the workshop ahead of him.

  The tannoy chimed. “Captain, to the bridge, sir. Captain, your presence is requested on the bridge.”

  “Some sleb probably tried to make toast on the reactor again,” Okoli said, sailing past her.

  ★

  The phavatar stood up. “Whew! Lost control for a minute.”

  “I hope that’s not going to happen when the PLAN gets here,” Jun said suspiciously.

  “Oh, no. I’m as safe as houses. It was just a glitch.”

  Sunlight spilled over them. Yumiko settled herself on a pile of construction debris. She looked so innocent, perfectly at home on her sub-zero, airless, radiation-drenched perch. Jun wished she would put on a spacesuit. He ran another radar scan. Still nothing.

  “So,” she said conversationally, “I figure we’ve got a bit of a wait.”

  “Do you know how fast the PLAN ships burn?”

  “No one knows for sure. They use explosive pulse fusion drives, which generate more thrust and acceleration than our magnetic containment drives, at the cost of being filthy. But there’s no helium-3 on Mars, so they’re thought to use deuterium-tritium fusion reactions, which are less efficient, and that requires them to carry more propellant. So they don’t travel at maximum thrust. They save their propellant for short-range maneuvers.”

  “I see.”

  “Short answer: they’ve never been observed getting from point A to point B at a delta-V of better than 400,000 meters per second, which takes you from Mars to Earth in about two weeks. Compare the specs of a UN Heavypicket. Maximum acceleration four gees, but that’s only sustainable very briefly, because your average human being’s heart will fail within a few minutes under vertical hyper-gravity stresses.”

  “Radical,” Jun drawled.

  “Yeah, but I’d really rathe
r talk about your ships.”

  “Our ships?”

  “The St Francis and the Nagasaki, unless you’ve got any others.”

  “They’re just beaters, as you guessed. Ninety-year-old space trucks. State-of-the-art when we emigrated in them. Now? They’ve got big cargo holds, and that’s the most you can say for them.”

  “But that’s what I want to talk about, Yonezawa Jun. Your cargoes.”

  “What about them? We import water. That’s all.”

  “But how do you pay for it? Even in the Belt, water isn’t cheap.”

  Jun felt hunted. He felt ashamed. “We export manufactured goods,” he blustered. “Fine porcelain, handcrafted religious items, katanas. People are willing to pay for quality, even today. We’ve got artisanal lineages here on this asteroid that go back centuries. I introduced you to our swordsmith, remember? He’s the twenty-sixth of his name. You can’t find that kind of accumulated expertise anywhere else in the solar system.”

  “Oh, I’m not questioning that, Yonezawa Jun. My question is, who buys this stuff? Where, in a Belt full of colonists skimping and recycling to stay alive, do you find customers for handcrafted luxury goods?”

  Jun slammed his palm angrily on the rock. “I don’t know. We deal with a middleman.”

  “A middleman. And he or she sells you stuff, correct?”

  “Water.”

  “But not just water. You said you brought your religious treasures here from Earth. But I looked up the customs records for 2206 …”

  Nothing was beyond the UN’s reach. If they could access archived SinoSpaceWays customs records from eighty-four years ago, what couldn’t they do?

  “There’s no record of a church organ being exported from Earth. Nor any crucifixes or anything like that. So either you broke the law, or …”

  “We broke the law,” Jun said. “That’s it. Remember, Catholicism had just been made illegal in Japan. We had to hide the symbols of our faith.”

  He thought this was a fairly inspired excuse, but the phavatar shook her head. “You were expelled from Japan precisely for being Catholic. The authorities knew what you were. They wouldn’t have penalized you any further for taking a church organ with you. No, I think the truth is different. You made that organ yourselves, right here. Same goes for the rest of your stuff.”