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

by Felix R. Savage

  They worked in silence for half an hour. Elfrida stared at the swirl of grounds in the bottom of her coffee cup.

  “Hey, Mendoza.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we call the Kharbage Collector and request a trip to 550363 Montego? I’m looking at your preliminary candidacy assessment here, and it scores pretty high on all geophysical criteria.”

  “What, you’re gonna pass on the chance to score some crypto-organic steaks?”

  “I can also do without the crypto-organic cow farts,” Elfrida said. “Those asimov-class suits do have olfactory sensors. But no, I figure this is a good chance to catch up with my old friends at Kharbage, LLC. Haven’t seen them in a while.”

  “They don’t operate many ships in this volume. I’ll put the call through.”

  The UNVRP office on Vesta didn’t have many frills, but it did have a dedicated comms satellite in orbit—a must for a two-person field office 200 million kilometers from Earth.

  Just 90 seconds later, Mendoza’s screen flashed. ”Hello, UNVRP Vesta, this is Captain Petruzzelli of the Kharbage Collector speaking. What can I do for you?”

  Elfrida sprang up from her ergoform, exceeding the resistance of her braces, and inadvertently crashed into Mendoza’s back. “Sorry! That’s Alicia Petruzzelli. I know her. Oh God, what’s she done to her hair?”

  iii.

  “Congratulations!” Elfrida gestured at the captain’s insignia on the fez pinned atop Petruzzelli’s hair. The fez was crimson, and Petruzzelli’s hair was now metallic turquoise. The colors clashed horribly. “Looks great!”

  “Do you really think it suits me?”

  “To a T. Captain Petruzzelli; it’s got a ring to it. And you’re only, what, my age?”

  “I mean the hair.”

  “Hmm. That I’m not so sure about. I think it might have looked better when it was magenta.”

  “I’m just trying out the blue. It’s semi-permanent.”

  They had to wait half a minute to hear each other’s responses, which was the time it took a signal to make a round trip between Vesta and the Kharbage Collector, a recycling barge currently cruising 4.9 million kilometers away.

  “You look great, too,” Petruzzelli said, at the same time as Elfrida blurted:

  “I was kind of worried. I thought they might’ve demoted you to assistant data analyst, or something.”

  Eighteen months ago, Elfrida, Alicia Petruzzelli, and Elfrida’s former boss had ‘borrowed’ a Star Force ship with an experimental hydrogen-boron fusion drive. Piloting the ship, Petruzzelli had fragged no fewer than three PLAN fighters. It had been a rare victory for humanity against the PLAN, the hostile AI that lurked on Mars and savaged the fringes of human civilization. They’d saved thousands of asteroid squatters from being nuked. But owing to political complications, they’d been forced to participate in UNVRP’s shameful cover-up of the whole affair.

  Elfrida had lost track of Petruzzelli after that. It made her happy to know that Petruzzelli had not only escaped any disciplinary consequences from Kharbage, LLC, but even scored a promotion.

  But Petruzzelli did not seem to want to talk about herself. “Seriously, you look really good! I love the barrettes, and you must have lost weight.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Elfrida smiled. “I’ve gained four kilos since I came to Vesta. And I’m all puffy from the micro-gravity.”

  Petruzzelli herself, by contrast, looked fit and lean. The blue hair had initially distracted Elfrida from noticing that she’d had her eyebrows tattooed in swoops that ended in little smiley-faces at the outer corners. She wore a baggy cardigan over a wifebeater and leggings that emphasized her taut physique. Apparently, Kharbage, LLC still had not succeeded in convincing its officers and crewpersons to wear their uniforms.

  The bridge of the Kharbage Collector echoed the theme of sloppiness. Maintenance was clearly going by the board. Cladding had come off the walls and the mirrored sides of the elevator shaft in the middle of the bridge. In some places it had been splarted back, in others left to flap loose. Screens at officers’ workstations flickered, stuck on error messages, or in one case, a porn vid.

  It’s their corporate culture, Elfrida told herself. The spirit of jugaad. Very private-sector.

  But Petruzzelli’s next remark seemed like an oblique apology for the state of her ship. “Sorry we haven’t got a better suit for you.” She reached out and flicked a fingernail against Elfrida’s cheek. “This is like talking to, um, a bot.”

  Elfrida controlled her instinctive flinch. After all, it wasn’t rude to touch a robot.

  Lying on a couch in the University of Vesta’s telepresence center, she was operating one of the ‘phavatars’—physical avatars—that the Kharbage Collector kept on board for visitors. Petruzzelli’s assessment summed it up: this suit made the widely maligned asimov-class phavatars look luxurious. From the neck down, it was a spacesuit animated by servos and artificial muscles. From the neck up it was a generic, multiracial, androgynous human with a dated geometrical haircut. Its sub-geminoid face, which Elfrida could see in the convex mirror suspended above Petruzzelli’s workstation, had a range of expressions so limited that her polite smile was coming out as a manic grin.

  “I’ve asked head office for something newer,” Petruzzelli said. “I mean c’mon, give me a tezuka-class at least, but noooo.”

  Before the most recent change of policy, it had been usual for subcontractors like Kharbage LLC to host Space Corps-owned phavatars on their ships. Now, Space Corps agents just used whatever phavatars their logistics partners happened to have lying around. It was a funny way for an agency to act that had recently scored a whopping budget increase. But this way Petruzzelli got to bill the Space Corps by the hour, so maybe it worked out more profitable for her.

  “Oh, I’m not complaining,” Elfrida said. “At least a čapek-class can’t drone on at you about its professional aspirations.”

  Twelve seconds later, Petruzzelli’s face crinkled up in a laugh, and her cheeks turned pink.

  “If I never operate a post-geminoid phavatar again, I’ll be happy,” Elfrida went on. “And I probably won’t have to. The stross-class has been recalled. For routine hardware updates, they say.”

  “Riiiight,” Petruzzelli said knowingly.

  The stross-class phavatar Elfrida used for the 11073 Galapagos job had been the most advanced telepresence platform ever designed by the UN’s Leadership In Robotics Institute. Elfrida’s unit had screwed up spectacularly, triggering the PLAN attacks on Botticelli Station and 11073 Galapagos.

  “Was it a true AI?” Petruzzelli asked.

  “No. It was trying to become one, but it never got there.” Far away on her couch, Elfrida shivered at the memory.

  “Uh, were there any consequences for you personally?” Petruzzelli asked awkwardly

  “They sent me back to Earth for six months. I had to do a lot of therapy. Fingerpainting and beadwork. Then when they figured I was fixed, they offered me a choice of reassignments. I think they’d have liked to fire me, but they couldn’t, because they’d already portrayed me as this heartwarming survival story. So I was offered Luna or Vesta, and I picked Vesta.” Elfrida made her phavatar shrug, lifting its elbows away from its sides. “Luna would’ve been a back-office job. Slow death by paperwork.”

  “And Vesta?”

  “Slow death by paperwork. With even less gravity. Laugh,” Elfrida said, using the emoticode, since the phavatar’s laughter sounded like a drawerful of cutlery being dropped on the floor. Twelve seconds later, Petruzzelli laughed with her. “But hey,” Elfrida added, “at least I got to see you again!”

  “Yeah! Seriously, it’s great to see you.” Petruzzelli whipped off her fez and frisbeed it across the bridge. It caught on the Eiffel Tower of empty drink pouches that someone was building at their workstation. “She shoots, she scores!”

  The playful gesture signalled that they were done sharing. Elfrida felt cheated, since she’d given more than she’d receive
d. There was a lot they hadn’t even touched on. For instance, the third member of their unauthorized ship-borrowing escapade: Elfrida’s then-boss, Gloria dos Santos. Did Petruzzelli know anything about what had happened to her?

  Probably not, Elfrida thought. Dos Santos had jumped ship and vanished.

  Instead of mentioning dos Santos, she said, “That’s cool. Is it new?”

  At the same time, Petruzzelli said, “So, about this asteroid of yours—”

  They heard each other simultaneously, and stopped simultaneously. “You first,” Petruzzelli smiled.

  “Oh, I was just saying that’s a cool chunk of gear.” With one mechanical hand, Elfrida indicated the 3D display floating above Petruzzelli’s workstation. It was a holographic sphere representing the solar system as seen from 2.4 AUs out, their present location. “Is it new? Captain Okoli didn’t have one.”

  “Yeah. We just got it a few months back. But look at this.” Petruzzelli stood up and reached towards the display. Though she stood 175 centimetres in her gecko boots, her fingers barely reached the bottom of the sphere. “Do they think we’re all freaking spaceborn, two and a half meters tall with the lean mass of a ten-year-old? I want to reinstall the projector at a lower angle, but I’m scared of breaking it. So I have to do this.” Petruzzelli hopped on top of her workstation. One boot on a crumb-covered plate, the other on a pile of printer substrates, she poked her head and shoulders into the middle of the sphere. “Great view,” she said, asteroids and planets spangling her face.

  “I think I’d better not try that.”.

  “No, better not. If you fell, it would set off the alarms and wake everyone up.”

  While the Kharbage Collector kept Greenwich time, Elfrida was operating on Vesta’s unique schedule. So Petruzzelli had had to get up in the middle of the night for her.

  “I’m really sorry I’m stealing your bunk time,” she apologized.

  “Oh, pooh. I wasn’t asleep. But my 2i/c is, thank God. Michael. Ugh, I haven’t even told you about him. I know he’d love to meet you, but you would not, trust me, love to meet him.” Petruzzelli cocked her head at the center of the display. She pointed, zoomed. The sphere emptied out, leaving only the Kharbage Collector itself, a firefly inching through a dark volume that contained a few tagged sparks. “Bear in mind this is all based on publically available astrodata. Which means it’s wildly incomplete. But according to the coordinates you gave me, here’s your rock. Know anything about it?”

  “Not much. This partnership with the University of Vesta is supposed to be a more efficient method of identifying candidates for the Venus Project. But my analyst and I are convinced that they’re not sharing everything they’ve got. Oh, it’s a long story. So, 550363 Montego, V-type asteroid, about 11 km wide across its longest dimension, albedo of 0.15, likely composed of basaltic chondrites. That’s all I’ve got.”

  Petruzzelli raised one of her tattooed eyebrows. The smiley-face at the eyebrow’s outer corner changed from a standard smile into an evil grin, with devil horns and sunglasses. “I guess it’s more exciting this way, huh?”

  “Oh yeah,” Elfrida said, adding lamely, “Sarcasm.” She wished she had emoticon eyebrows. Someone should make a phavatar with those.

  “Well, you’ll know more about it pretty soon. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  ★

  One detail about 550363 Montego that Elfrida had not mentioned, assuming Petruzzelli would already be aware of it, was that it was owned by the Centiless Corporation. Legal ownership of asteroids was first-come-first-served. Most of them had been scooped up by resource mining companies during the early years of space exploration.

  Not by any means all of them. The system was now thought to contain 200 million asteroids large enough to be classified as such, and more were still being discovered.

  This was one goal of the University of Vesta’s astronomical survey program.

  In practice, however, the university was mostly rediscovering asteroids that already belonged to someone. Corporations were not obliged to disclose their assets. In fact, they guarded such data jealously. Thus, the university was building a starmap of the Belt’s central region that already existed, in half a dozen more- or less-complete versions, in private hands. Several of the supermajors had sued the university, trying to have the survey stopped on grounds of breach of privacy.

  But the supermajors were quick enough to disclose ownership of an asteroid when someone else tried to claim it. The pattern had gotten so predictable that John Mendoza had given up posting claims to any candidates they found. Instead, he just pinged the usual suspects and asked, “Is this yours?” Nine times out of ten, it was.

  Not that Centiless, Elfrida reflected, could have any intention of exploiting 550363 Montego. It was too puny.

  It rotated in Petruzzelli’s 3D display, a pale gray lump the shape of a ginger root. Its relatively high albedo indicated the presence of some silicates in addition to the basaltic chondrites you would expect. V-type asteroids, or vestoids, as their name suggested, were literally bits of Vesta, having been blown into space by the primordial impact that created their parent’s vast Rheasilvia Crater. They had all Vesta’s charms: no gravity, regolith so smooth you could slide on it, overlapping craters that stymied landings—minus the one element that had made Vesta worthy of human attention in the first place: hydrogen. No economically-minded human being could have any use for an object like 550363 Montego.

  But Elfrida had been working with UNVRP for eight years now, and she’d met people living in much worse places. The majority of human beings were not economically-minded.

  So she wasn’t exactly surprised when a voice blared into the bridge of the Kharbage Collector. “Heave to, me hearties, ‘fore I blast yez into yonder void! Resistance is futile! Ye’re in my crosshairs, and vairy pretty do ye look there!”

  Elfrida blinked, startled. Then she said, “Here we go again.”

  “Yez are surrounded by drones armed with infrared-guided projectiles,” the voice threatened. “One word from me and yez’ll have sunlight coming through your tokamak!”

  “Screw you and your lame-ass heatseeking missiles,” Petruzzelli replied. “Do you know what kind of a ship you’re looking at?”

  “A raddled auld twin-module Startractor with a heap o’ tasty-looking cargo in her bays.”

  “Well, this old ship happens to be armed to the teeth. My own drones are currently zeroing in on the source of your signal.” Petruzzelli’s fingers danced over her console. “And if semi-autonomous micro-weapons platforms aren’t scary enough for you, take a look at my forward radome. That’s a rocket launcher loaded with scattershot warheads.”

  “Try penetrating a couple of kilometers of solid rock with ball bearings, me beauty.”

  “Thanks for telling me where you are,” Petruzzelli said.

  The 3D asteroid hanging over their heads developed granular detail as data poured in from the Kharbage Collector’s drones. A Superlifter tug perched on a protrusion, like a mosquito on a knobbly knee. Near the Superlifter, false color identified a cave mouth enveloped in a dangerous cloud of tailings.

  “So, did you ever study basic math?” Petruzzelli said. “All I have to do is increase my velocity relative to yours, and Ke = 0.5 x M x V2, idiot. Depending on how much I accelerate, each of my ball bearings will deliver kinetic energy equal or greater than its mass in TNT. So, no, they won’t penetrate your rock. I think they’re much more likely to shatter it into a million little fragments. Don’t you?”

  There was a pause. When the voice came back on the air, it sounded somewhat less piratical. “Ye’re not supposed to carry tactical warheads, if ye really are a civilian, and not an undercover.”

  “There are no undercover Star Force patrols,” Petruzzelli scoffed. ”That’s a myth. They’re stretched thin enough without going after plebs like you. Which is why we’ve taken the precaution of tooling up.” She winked at Elfrida, which could have meant that she was bluffing about the
warheads, or could have been meant to charm Elfrida into accepting her flirtation with the wrong side of the law. Many private-sector ships did in fact carry weapons, licensed or not. In a system that included the PLAN, that was basic common sense. Elfrida certainly wasn’t going to report her for it. “Do we understand each other better now?” Petruzzelli pushed.

  “Sure we do. We’re just innocent colonists trying to scrape a living. Ye’re a great bullying corsair that’s come to steal our resources, pitiful as they are. Ye should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “God,” Petruzzelli said. “We haven’t come to steal your shit. I’ve got a Space Corps agent on board. She’s come all this way to talk to you, although I don’t know whether she still wants to, after you were so rude.” She turned to Elfrida. The smiley-faces at the ends of her eyebrows went quizzical.

  “Sure,” Elfrida said. After all, this was only a čapek-class phavatar. “I’ll head over right now, if that’s OK.”

  iv.

  “Sorry I can’t go with you,” Petruzzelli said. “Company regs. But take some of my drones. I’ll give you an uplink. That’s actually against regs, too, but since you’re a friend …”

  “I’m sure I’ll be OK,” Elfrida said. “But thanks. I’ll take the drones.”

  “Just in case.”

  “Just in case,” Elfrida confirmed, noting that Petruzzelli’s eyebrows were doing evil grin, while her expression remained professionally bland.

  The drones were useful for more than offensive applications. Powered by tiny ion-propulsion engines, they could sub for a personal mobility system, which Elfrida’s phavatar did not have. She tethered herself to them and was towed across the gap between the Kharbage Collector and 550363 Montego. Behind her, the Collector matched the asteroid’s slow tumble through space, its radiator fins bristling, its radome glinting in the light of the peppercorn-sized sun.

  “Be careful,” Petruzzelli said in her ear.