“I want to heeeelp. How can I heeelp yooouu?”
The phavatar’s dragging, retarded-sounding speech gave Jun chills. “Careful, Father, she may be dangerous!”
Yumiko looked around the catacomb, a cramped, hexagonal room with consoles set into dull pink walls. “Where iiiiis this? What’re you doooinng? The cathedral is fuuullll of peeeople. Aaaare you just going to pray that the PLAAAAAN doesn’t show uuuup?”
Jun could not resist gloating. He spread his arms. “You asked about our ships. Well, the St. Francis is somewhere between Mars and the Belt. I told you the truth about that. But the Nagasaki is right here. You’re standing on her bridge.”
The phavatar stared at him.
“The ship is the cathedral; the cathedral is the ship. We built it around her. Splarted her to the asteroid, splarted hunks of regolith onto her hull. Every once in a while, we fire up her reactor and pulse the attitude boosters for a microsecond or two. Come on, how did you think we spun up an asteroid this size?”
“We’re evacuating,” Father Hirayanagi said, his face etched with sadness. “Like the Israelites fleeing Egypt, we trust in God to deliver us out of the grasp of our enemies, as He did once before, and lead us to a better place.”
Jun nodded, although beyond the drive initiation and launch procedures, his mind was a total blank. He could not picture any ‘better place’ beyond near-term survival.
“Ohhhhh,” the phavatar said, and then, “I think I heard something.”
Simultaneously, Father Hirayanagi exclaimed, “I’m picking up activity on the radar. Several ships. Two hundred thousand kilometers out … a hundred and ninety … closing.”
“It’s the PLAN!” the phavatar exclaimed. “They’re heeeere!”
Neither man paid any attention to this statement of the obvious. Father Hirayanagi said, “I think we’d better get everyone on board as quickly as possible.”
Jun was already diving up to the nearest hatch. He knew that slightly more than half the Galapajin were still in the habitat, waiting patiently in line for their turn to board.
★
Elfrida logged out. She had used up twenty-nine of her allotted thirty-three minutes. Most of those had been spent flicking in desperation through the user’s manual, trying not to get distracted by the chapter on sex, and finally figuring out how to deploy Yumiko’s thrusters. Her flippant first guess—microboosters in Yumiko’s heels—had been pretty close. The main difference was that the thrusters were located in the small of Yumiko’s back. From a distance, Elfrida feared, her return to 11073 Galapagos must have looked as if she were shooting fire out of her ass.
But there had been no one left on the surface of the asteroid to observe her. They had all taken refuge in the cathedral.
The cathedral …
The ship.
She blinked the logout screen away and said with a dreamy smile, “They’re going to evacuate the entire population in a century-old people-carrier decorated with statuary. Honestly, these people … are incredible.”
The Galapajin’s resourcefulness, determination, and ability to pull together in the face of danger embodied what she had always supposed to be the best qualities of the Japanese.
“Did you get the survey data?” dos Santos screamed at her.
Elfrida belatedly realized that the bridge was in an uproar, all sorts of alerts and alarms going off. Petruzzelli knelt on her couch, waving her arms like an orchestra conductor.
“The data!” Dos Santos zoomed her couch around the gyrosphere and shook Elfrida’s arm. The ship was no longer boosting; they were in freefall again. Dos Santos’s hair floated like tinsel.
“What data?”
“The survey data! The data from your assessment of the asteroid! Your reports! The polls, the interviews!”
“Uh … isn’t all that stuff in the data dump on B-Station?”
“It may be,” dos Santos said grimly. “Have you looked at the data dump recently? It’s like this huge … teeming … bleeding … ball of maggots. I am not kidding. Maggots.”
“She is so unoriginal,” Elfrida said.
“You think she did it on purpose, to cover her tracks? You may be right. I can’t find anything in there. It’s all corrupted.”
“Her onboard search space is even worse. Black curtains, water on the floor, sacrificed animals, porny holos …”
“I’m sure, but did you find the data?”
“Ma’am, I’m really sorry, but I didn’t know I was supposed to be searching for it.”
“I thought that’s what you were doing!”
“Uh, no,” Elfrida said, mortified.
“Shit.” Dos Santos floated limply against her straps. She sucked on a pouch of morale juice.
The ship juddered gently. “Got him!” Petruzzelli screamed, punching the air. “Who’s the boss? Ha ha ha ha!”
“What’s going on?” Elfrida pleaded.
“We’re fighting the PLAN,” dos Santos said. “Or rather, the combat program is. She just thinks she’s doing it.”
“Those tremors you feel,” said Lieutenant Kliko, “are our rail guns.” He was floating immobile in his twang-cord bonds, his eyes closed, his face the color of unprocessed nutriblocks.
“I’m unlimbering the plasma cannon now,” Petruzzelli yelped. “Wanna watch? Just switch your display to external optic feed and hit enhance!”
Elfrida did so. Her screen turned into a 3D display of space. 11073 Galapagos floated like a defect on the face of the sun. Helpfully colored red, a group of three dots inched towards it from the lower left quadrant of the screen. The Cheap Trick was overhauling the PLAN ships, while they closed in on the asteroid. A whooshing sound burst from the bridge’s speakers. A microsecond later, one of the dots flashed white and vanished.
“Score two!” Petruzzelli yelled, over the noise of an explosion from the speakers.
Kliko said, “Can you please turn off the sound effects?”
“No,” Petruzzelli said. “They’re cool.”
Elfrida bit her thumbnail. “This is just like a game. I thought it would be, I don’t know, scarier.”
“If you’re not scared, that’s because you don’t know what’s going on,” Kliko said.
“He’s right, I’m afraid,” dos Santos said. “But we can’t do anything to help. It’s up to Petruzzelli and the software. What we need to do is get that data.”
“Why?”
“Goto, recall your training. Recall the most fundamental operating rules of the Space Corps. Now tell me why we need the data.”
“Oh, no,” Elfrida said in disbelief.
“Oh, yes. We can only render assistance to an asteroid population if that asteroid belongs to the UN.”
“But we are rendering assistance to them!”
“Which means we need the data right now, so that we can put the purchase through before questions are asked.” Dos Santos tapped the center of Elfrida’s forehead with her forefinger. “This is how the bureaucracy works, Goto. You can defy orders, steal a spaceship, do whatever … as long as your paperwork looks good.”
“But the data dump is corrupted, and the onboard search space is a total mess. I think she may even be deleting stuff she doesn’t want. She’s not supposed to have that capability, but she’s got a lot of capabilities I wasn’t told about.”
The sound of another explosion rocked the bridge, vibrating deep in Elfrida’s chest.
“I pumped up the bass on that one,” Petruzzelli said happily. “Ha, ha! Blew him to shit! Look at that!”
The screen zoomed in on the coordinates of the third PLAN ship. A shell of color-enhanced debris whizzed outward in slow motion from a tiny collapsing star.
“In order to be doing this,” dos Santos said with strained patience, “we have to have already acquired the asteroid. Do you understand? And we cannot acquire the asteroid without the survey data, because that’s how the purchasing system works.”
“Can’t we fake it?”
“I’m going to pretend
I didn’t hear that. Dr. Hasselblatter is pulling for us, do you understand? He’s liaising with Star Force to keep us alive. We have to help him out.”
Dos Santos’s face was wryly contorted. Elfrida suspected there was something—something else—she wasn’t telling her. But the problem was clear enough—and apparently insoluble. “Ma’am, how can we get the data, if the data dump and the onboard search space are both corrupted, and I’ve used up all my telecasting time, anyway?”
“Have some morale juice,” dos Santos said. Elfrida didn’t want any more, but she took the pouch and sucked on its nozzle. “If we had the actual, physical memory crystals, the ship’s hub could run a deep repair routine and put the data back together. Soooo …” Dos Santos spread her hands. “We’ll just have to retrieve the phavatar.”
★
Jun stood outside the cathedral, alternately squinting into space and staring at his radar scanner. The latter gave him a better view, but the temptation to look up was irresistible. And what he saw defied explanation.
First, there had been five ships decelerating towards 11073 Galapagos.
Then four.
Then three.
And now there were only two.
Conclusion, as improbable as it seemed: one of those ships was not a PLAN fighter. It was shooting the PLAN fighters down.
“Thank you, Lord,” Jun whispered. “Someone out there is on our side.”
★
“Missed!” Petruzzelli wailed. “Oh, doggone it!”
“No one’s perfect all the time,” said Lieutenant Kliko. “Not even a computer.”
“Come here, you dumb toilet roll!”
“Try boosting our acceleration,” Kliko said. “What probably happened was the toilet roll has completed its deceleration burn and gone into tactical maneuvering mode. It couldn’t alter trajectory before, because we’d have caught up with it. But now it’s close enough to its target, it doesn’t care, because it’ll get them before we can get it.”
“If you’re so smart, why don’t you take over?”
“Oh no, not me. I’m just the diversity officer.”
Dos Santos massaged her face. “That might be it. If the toilet roll’s gone into tactical mode, we’ll never stop it in time. They’re incredibly fast and dirty when they get to maneuvering.”
“But we’re fast, too,” Petruzzelli said between her teeth. “I think it’s time to really see what this new engine can do.”
Dos Santos sat up straight. “Wait! Wait, Petruzzelli! Don’t burn yet. We—” she indicated Elfrida— “have to get off!”
xxiv.
“How many left to board?” Jun said into his radio.
“About a thousand,” Sister Emily-Francis said.
“Can you move them along any faster?”
“Are you ready to launch?”
“Yup.” On his dinky little 2D radar scanner, he watched the two surviving ships approach. The lead ship was eight thousand kilometers out. Seven. Which one was it? The surviving PLAN fighter, or their friend?
“What are you doing out there? Stargazing?”
Jun breathed deeply. The air in this communally owned EVA suit smelled like stale ramen. Like the kitchen in the Yonezawa family compound. Like home. “You caught me. Guess I just wanted to say goodbye.”
“Oh, by the way,” Emily-Francis said, “that robot of yours has gone down-rock. Running like the devil was on her heels. I called out to her, but she didn’t stop.”
“Not my robot.”
“No? I guess I was just imagining that you were treating her possessively.”
“I was going to dismantle her for parts.”
“What a shame that would have been, when she’s so pretty.”
“And baptized into the Faith, too,” Jun said. “Forget the robot. Just keep ’em moving.”
Jun and Father Hirayanagi had not told anyone they had detected the PLAN’s approach. It would only terrify people, and it wouldn’t alter the number of Galapajin who could fit through the cathedral airlock at one time.
“Is everything all right?” Emily-Francis said perceptively.
“Everything’s fine,” he said, and then the night sky lit up so brightly that for the first time in his life he seemed to be seeing lightning. The asteroid bucked, tossing him into space. His tether snapped taut. He was blind. His breath rasped in his ears, too fast. He hauled himself hand over hand back towards the airlock.
His radio sputtered. He heard a scream. He thought it was Emily-Francis. Then the channel went quiet.
Find airlock. Release handle. Lift hatch. Into chamber.
Just before he jerked the hatch shut, his faceplate, which had automatically gone black on detecting the flash, started to detint, and as if in deep twilight, he saw a shard of rock with a hydroponic tank attached shoot past him and shatter against the cathedral.
He also saw that half of the asteroid was missing.
★
“No,” Petruzzelli screamed. “The metalfucker got them.”
“But maybe it didn’t get the people!” Elfrida shouted. “They were going to evacuate! They might all be safe in the cathedral!”
“Until it doubles back and throws another nuke at them,” Petruzzelli said. “It’s burning out on a tangent, figuring we’ll chase it, but won’t be able to catch it. Well, it’s wrong. Strap in, everyone.”
“No,” dos Santos panted. She and Elfrida were sealing themselves into Star Force EVA suits.
“Well, hurry up!”
Elfrida floundered across the bridge. “I can’t believe I’m about to risk my life to cover Dr. Hasselblatter’s ass,” she groaned.
“Welcome to your career,” dos Santos said.
The airlock was big enough for a platoon. Elfrida tumbled into the chamber.
“Rrrraoohhrr!”
Hopped up on morale juice and desperation, Lieutenant Kliko launched himself off his couch, shedding twang cords left and right. He crashed into dos Santos and locked his arms around her.
“No! I won’t let you do it! You’re crazy! I don’t want to die!”
The two of them spun together into the web of grab cables. Kicking and punching, dos Santos shouted, “Drop-off window’s closing, Goto! Go!”
Elfrida floated in the airlock chamber, transfixed.
“Well, Goto?” Dos Santos flashed her a challenging grin, her face jammed between Kliko’s side and his bicep. “Are they training you kids properly these days?”
★
Elfrida drifted out of the Cheap Trick’s airlock, into a serene silence.
Petruzzelli had finessed the ship’s delta-V to less than 1% of max, working against the combat program. The Cheap Trick was still moving at several hundred meters a second, but Elfrida had inherited that velocity and was moving at the same speed, for now. The ship seemed to float stationary above her like a giant refrigerator wearing a tutu of radiator fins. The Star Force logo frowned at the sun.
“What are you waiting for?” Petruzzelli shouted in her ears, shattering the peace. “Get out of the way!”
“I’m going, I’m going!” Elfrida shrieked.
Petruzzelli waited until Elfrida had fired up her mobility pack and buzzed away from the ship. Then she re-engaged the main drive. The refrigerator farted out an infernally glowing cloud of waste gas, illuminated for safety purposes, and shot away so fast that Elfrida lost sight of it almost immediately.
She puttered towards 11073 Galapagos, trying not to think about what she was doing.
In the far distance, a spot of light streaked across the black.
“Are you OK?” she screamed.
“Fine,” Petruzzelli grunted. “Just switched into plasma exhaust mode.”
“Is dos Santos all right?”
“Yeah. Kliko isn’t. She’s thumping his ass. I need to concentrate.” Petruzzelli cut the connection.
Elfrida swallowed, which made a loud clicking noise in her ears. She checked her HUD and the backup display on her forearm, just to make sur
e they both said the same thing. This suit was a spare one belonging to the Marines, and as such it was well-equipped. She had enough oxygen for a week. She had emergency rations. She had a smart diaper strapped between her legs. She had plenty of battery power. Her mobility pack, which resembled a small backpack strapped onto her suit, utilized electrically powered control moment gyroscopes; it was not as powerful as Yumiko’s integrated thrusters. 11073 Galapagos approached slowly.
She had plenty of time to take in the damage the PLAN had done.
The large end of the asteroid was gone. Vaporized, as if a cleaver had whacked the octopus in half. The sun-tube hung out of the open end like a broken spine, still shining.
Since the Cheap Trick had matched the asteroid’s velocity before dropping Elfrida off, landing would be a snap. Her suit pinged, registering low-velocity impacts from particles dispersed by the explosion.
Out of nowhere, a bus-sized fragment plummeted at her. She instinctively threw her weight to the side. The suit picked up on her intent and carried her out of the way, just in time. The fragment hurtled past her and lost itself in space. It looked to have been a piece of the 11073 Galapagos schoolhouse, decorated with children’s murals of the saints.
“Oh God,” Elfrida whimpered, not even realizing she was saying God. “I don’t want to die.”
Unconsciously echoing Lieutenant Kliko, she dived towards the asteroid. She wanted to get into shelter, out of this volume that—she now realized—was lethally riddled with debris.
The shell of the asteroid, ranging from 50 to 100 meters thick, had been shot through with passages and mini-voids, all sealed with splart. A few of these still had containment. Buzzing into the open end of the asteroid, Elfrida glimpsed private homes and verdant grottoes, each nestled in its own bubble—an affluent dimension of Galapajin society that Yonezawa had not seen fit to include in his guided tour. People pressed their hands against the epoxy, signaling desperately for her attention. So there were some survivors. “I can’t do anything for you right now,” she muttered, knowing they could not hear her. “I’ll come back, I promise!”
The sun-tube had come loose from its moorings and crashed into the city. It would have started a conflagration, if there had been any oxygen left in the habitat. Elfrida threaded her way between floating trees, dead birds, and pieces of houses. Slowly, the wreckage was drifting into clumps. The asteroid would soon be a rubble pile again. But this time the rubble would be made of people’s lives.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 20