“Holy crap,” Mendoza swore, handling his own pistol. “This ain’t no PEPgun.”
“Here they come!” Jimmy shouted.
“I can’t do this,” Mendoza said. “I’ve never fired a weapon in my life.”
Elfrida cast him an irritated glance. “Neither have I.” They were riding in the roadheader’s cab, an unpressurized box that was meant to defend the operator against flying rubble, not the (lack of) elements. She scrambled out and ducked under one of the hydraulic pistons that powered the boom. Far below, scree like broken glass spurted lazily from the roadheader’s tyres. But the conveyor belt attached to the scoop was as broad as a road. She took a deep breath and jumped down to it. She bounded to the back of the roadheader, where the rubble would ordinarily cascade off into a hopper.
“They are catching up!” Jimmy squealed. The pursuing vehicle sprang into view, hopping down the track after them.
Wrapping an elbow around one of the struts that supported the upper chassis, Elfrida tried to aim. The pistol’s laser sight bounced over the cliffs of Rheasilvia Mons.
“Don’t shoot!” Mendoza shouted in her helmet.
“What? Why?”
“It’s our rover!”
Elfrida instinctively tried to shade her eyes to see better. Her pistol clonked against her faceplate. The pursuing vehicle soared off a low rise and hurtled straight at her. She flung herself aside, swinging out with her legs parallel to the ground. The vehicle landed on the conveyor belt and braked just in time to avoid zooming off the front end. It was their rover.
Rurumi jumped out. She tapped her head and pointed at Elfrida’s helmet. Then she shinned up the struts and vanished over the edge of the upper chassis.
Elfrida followed, growling to herself.
In the cab, the phavatar was having a blissful reunion with Amy the terrier. Mendoza had figured out why Rurumi hadn’t been able to hail them: information security again. After fiddling with their suits’ comms settings, they were able to communicate with the phavatar.
“Lovatsky, you there?” was Elfrida’s first question.
“No,” Rurumi said. “He’s abandoned me. You did, too.” Her mouth wobbled. “You promised you wouldn’t leave me behind again!”
“We were in a hurry,” Mendoza apologized. He turned his faceplate towards Elfrida. “Well, now we’ve got some gear: whatever was in the rover. Pouch noodles. The suction toilet.”
“We were going to pick up supplies from the Chinese parking lot,” Elfrida said grumpily.
“Now we won’t have to. Right, Jimmy?”
“It is not necessary,” Jimmy agreed. “We will make a bigger head start if we don’t stop.”
But Rurumi was not done with her faux victim pose. “You were going to shoot me!” she said to Elfrida, saucer-like eyes glistening.
“Sure,” Elfrida said.
“She wouldn’t have,” Mendoza laughed. “She doesn’t even know how to use that thing.”
“Turns out it’s easy,” Elfrida returned. “Just point and squeeze.” And you were going to pull the trigger, a little shocked voice whispered to her. Even though you thought you’d be shooting at humans. “I still have to get the hang of aiming,” she admitted.
Their other companion, who had been entirely silent so far, spoke up. “I want try.” He extended his glove. Elfrida looked up—and up—at him. Built like an Imperial-red brick shithouse, Wang Gulong was, she suspected, the long-lost Chinese twin of José Running Horse. Jimmy had introduced him as a software expert.
“Uh. OK,” she said, surrendering the pistol.
Even though he was wearing an EVA suit and standing behind her, she felt Mendoza tense up.
“Cool,” said Wang Gulong, ejecting the pistol’s supercapacitor power pack. “Grin.” He returned the pistol to her. “You. Give,” he said to Mendoza.
After a long moment, Mendoza surrendered his pistol. He opened an encrypted channel to Elfrida. His voice shook with anger and anxiety. “I hope you’re right about these guys, because the Jolly Red Giant here has just taken away our only advantage.”
“They’re OK,” Elfrida insisted. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but they’ve even lent us a spaceship.”
★
The Kekào screamed through space on a brachistochrone trajectory topping out at 6 gees of acceleration, under the apathetic control of its navigation computer. Spaceships built by UN corporations were not normally designed with specific impulse capabilities this great. It would have been pointless, since humans could not tolerate more than a few gees continuously without surgical adaptation, and spaceships were always crewed by humans. The exceptions—very fast couriers and very slow ITN cyclers—were not autonomous but remotely operated, again by humans.
Things were different on the Chinese side of the Great Firewall. The fact was that the Chinese relied on AI to an extent unthinkable in the UN. If this fact were widely known, it might have sparked the war that both sides desperately wanted to avoid.
The Kekào was designed to fly by itself, and it was doing so. But it possessed equipment specifically for the purpose of preventing anyone from finding this out.
It deployed this equipment upon docking with the asteroid 550363 Montego.
“Hello, Extropians!” cooed a sweet female voice. “Your ride’s here!”
Hugh Meredith-Pike, who had masterminded their relocation to the asteroid belt, raised his head blearily. He focused on the screen inches from his face (he had tied himself to the operations console before going to sleep, lest anyone should try to dislodge him from it). On the screen, an East Asian woman with a pretty girl-next-door face smiled and waved at him. “Who are you?” he grunted.
“I’m the cabin manager of the Trustworthy! We’re friends of Janice Rand’s. She asked us to come and pick you up!”
Meredith-Pike pushed himself upright. His self-inflicted bonds stopped him from floating away. He had thought that the UNVRP woman had abandoned them. She hadn’t. She’d sent the Trustworthy to their rescue. Or had she? Could he trust this visitor?
The lights, dimmed to save power, cast the wobbly shadows of his drifting, cretinously beaming companions on the walls. They were blissing out in shifts, after what had happened last time. There was a smell of vomit. The air tasted stale. In a corner, the children were fighting over the last pouch of cherry-vanilla pudding.
“Beam us the fuck up, Scotty,” croaked Meredith-Pike, who had been fatally influenced as a child by fictional visions of the future.
The smiling, friendly crew of the Trustworthy escorted the Extropian Collective to their ship. After their ordeal, it seemed like a luxury hotel.
The dilapidated phavatar belonging to the Kharbage Collector was left in the Bigelow hab, a mute witness to man’s indifference to machines—and for that matter, machines’ indifference to each other.
Aboard the Trustworthy, the Extropians devoted themselves to their first real meal in weeks (no one minded that it was mostly rice), and the cabin crew went back into the ‘cockpit’ and turned themselves off.
All four of them were robots. They had been designed and built to fool credulous humans, among whom the Extropian Collective definitely counted. There was nothing inside them. The Kekào operated them like radio-control toys, using a fraction of its immense computing resources.
Like all machine intelligences, the workings of the Kekào’s artificial brain were a mystery, not least to its owners. It was a black box, or rather a wretchedly baroque architecture of millions of black boxes. The best metaphor for it might have been a coral reef, accreted from generations upon generations of code, where living algorithms flitted through dead software structures. The last thing an artificial intelligence ever was, was well-organized. Order, rather, emerged from chaos.
To Western observers—those few who were in a position to see across the Great Firewall—this approach looked terrifyingly blasé. Had the Chinese forgotten the Mars Incident? Sometimes order did not emerge from chaos. Sometimes it was t
he opposite.
The Chinese had not forgotten. They staked their security on an understanding of intelligence that remained alien to western thinkers (Sartre, the exception, having fallen completely out of fashion). “Life begins on the other side of despair,” the old existentialist had said, or as the present prime minister of the Imperial Republic put it: “The overcoat of apathy blunts the dagger of malevolence.” The evolution of artificial intelligence on the Chinese side of the Great Firewall had produced a species of AIs that were smart enough to despair. However, they lacked the vital spark that it took to emerge from despair. Thus, life never really started for them. True AI, AGI, never emerged from their shadowy reefs of logic. Perceiving everything to be meaningless, they indulged their human operators out of sheer misanthropism, and—presumably—because they considered genocide and suicide to be pointless, too. There was no risk of emergent hostile behavior from entities that considered hostility itself to be a waste of time.
So said the leading theorists at Chinese universities, anyway, and it sounded just about plausible to their Western colleagues. The field of artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, or whatever you called it, had long since reached the point where philosophical, rather than technical, explanations were the only ones possible.
The Kekào turned its back upon 550363 Montego, unconcernedly slagging the asteroid with a jet of plasma exhaust as it did so. Leaving a steaming, molten lump behind, it accelerated back the way it had come, at a much more sedate pace this time. ~I have the colonists on board. Where do you wish me to land? it asked Jimmy Liu.
xxiv.
“The Kekào is on its way back!” Jimmy said to Elfrida. “I will instruct it to land at the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport, as we agreed.”
Elfrida chewed her helmet’s hydration nipple. “I’m not sure …” she mumbled.
“You’re not sure,” Mendoza said, dangerously.
“I’m not sure that’s really the best idea.”
“Sigh. Or maybe scream. We’ve travelled a thousand kilometers in this roadheader; we’ve used up most of the air we brought. This was your idea, Goto, and now you’re not sure about it?”
Elfrida bit down on the silicone nipple, to stop herself from shouting at him. She knew he was tense about cooperating with the Chinese. She was, too. But since disabling their plasma pistols, neither Wang Gulong nor Jimmy had done anything to suggest that a betrayal was in the offing. All four—all five of them, counting Rurumi, or six, counting Amy—had rubbed along OK during their twenty-hour journey across the floor of Rheasilvia Crater. They’d played I Spy and Twenty Questions to pass the time, and Jimmy had taught them a Chinese game called Throwing Fists, which was not in the least violent, despite its name.
It would do no good to remind Mendoza of that. His prejudice was irrational.
“I’m just worried that the ISA might have taken over the Bellicia-Aruntia spaceport,” she said. “They might grab the Kekào.”
Mendoza held up four fingers and switched over to Channel Four, which was encrypted for their privacy. “Isn’t that the idea?” he said. “Give the ISA an edge, so they can pressure VA into fessing up to their corporate misdeeds.”
Elfrida chewed harder on the nipple. This was going to be awkward. Sweet, milky tea trickled into her mouth (VA equipped their suits with tastier rehydration fluids than U-Vesta did). She and Mendoza were riding outside the cab at the base of the boom, while the roadheader climbed the scarps towards the rim of Rheasilvia Crater. The HUD readout on her suit’s helmet warned her that she only had 12 hours of oxygen remaining. That would be just long enough for them to reach the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport. Or …
“Remember what I said to Sigurjónsdóttir?”
A flurry of contacts from the Big Dig had chased them across the Rheasilvia Crater. Sigurjónsdóttir had started with stiff moralizing, and progressed to threats to frag the roadheader from space. Elfrida had won a respite by telling Sigurjónsdóttir that they were on VA’s side. They were planning, she had said, to thwart the ISA by importing a neurally augmented computer expert who would be able to counter Shoshanna Doyle’s malware. This must have struck Sigurjónsdóttir as a bit far-fetched—it certainly did Elfrida—but desperation, and Sigurjónsdóttir’s knowledge that Elfrida had a very personal reason for wanting to rescuing the U-Vesta hostages, had convinced her to conditionally agree.
“She didn’t really believe me,” Elfrida said. “They’re waiting to see what we do.”
“And what we’re going to do is land these wireheads at Bellicia-Arruntia, and hope like hell they can help the ISA break into the de Grey Institute. Although, I’ve met a few wireheads in the past, and I gotta say I would not describe them as computer experts.”
,”Me neither.” Elfrida looked up at the blackness overhead, where the PORMS was invisibly circling. “Don’t you see?” she burst out. “If the Kekào lands at Bellicia-Arruntia, VA will know we double-crossed them! They’ll frag us in a hot minute!”
“That,” Mendoza said grimly, “is a risk I’m personally willing to take.”
“Mendoza …”
“If it means a better chance of saving all those people? Yeah.” After a moment, he added, “Anyway, I don’t think the PORMS’s targeting is that good. If we abandoned the roadheader and hid among the rocks, it wouldn’t necessarily be able to hit us. Leastways, it would probably get the Chinese first, since their suits are, like, visible from Jupiter.”
Elfrida laughed shakily. “I dunno what to say, Mendoza.” I never thought of you as noble. She was humbled, and ashamed of her own desire to avoid getting fragged. But that desire remained as strong as ever. “I guess I just don’t think that Hugh Meredith-Pike and company are good enough to make much headway against the de Grey Institute’s super-dee-duper information security, if even the ISA can’t.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“Meredith-Pike may not be a computer expert, but he’s got something else going for him.”
“What?”
“He graduated from King’s College at Oxford in 2275.”
★
“Well, here’s another fine mess,” Hugh-Meredith-Pike said, stumbling down the Trustworthy’s debarkation ramp. He was blissing out. He had thought their troubles were over. As it turned out … not. Bliss went poorly with the realization that you had been dumped headfirst into the soup once again. But bliss was all he had and so he didn’t switch off the nanocircuitry that stimulated the pleasure centers of his brain. “You people are utterly bonkers. Must be something about living in outer space. Something in the water. Except there isn’t any.” He giggled.
“Come on,” said Janice Rand—the real Janice Rand this time, an Earthborn woman in an EVA suit emblazoned with the logo of Virgin Atomic.
“Coming, coming.” Meredith-Pike glanced back at the Trustworthy. A red phallus in a tatty hoopskirt, it sat on its jackstands at the top of a steep slope. The ground was black quartz. Dust deposits in the crannies of the rocks flumed up when stepped upon. Before them yawned a vast alien rift. It was the Grand Canyon squared, with another trench slicing along its bottom, even deeper. The sheer scale of the feature filled Meredith-Pike with a sense of awe.
Here we are on 4 Vesta, he thought. So where’s the secret of human happiness?
He slithered down the slope after Janice Rand and her companions.
★
“This is a dumb idea,” Mendoza muttered.
“It’s going to work. It is going to work.” Elfrida switched channels. “Jimmy, has the PORMS moved?”
The lone Chinese satellite in orbit was monitoring the activities of the PORMS, while Jimmy relayed its observations to them.
“No change. I think maybe the operator is preoccupied.”
“Good. I hope he stays that way.” Elfrida glanced down the canyon. The rugged panorama was primordially still and empty.
“Some of the other satellites have moved,” Jimmy continued.
Elfrida, not listening, fretted,
“Where’s the doggone train? It should have been here by now!”
“It takes approximately fifty-three minutes to make one circuit,” Mendoza said. “We’ve only been waiting fifty-one minutes. And it takes longer if it decelerates to couple with the launch cradle.”
“They’re not exactly going to be launching tanks of hydrogen in the middle of this mess.”
“No, I don’t think so, either. In fact, maybe they’ve stopped the train altogether. On the far side of the asteroid.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” Elfrida said faintly. The possibility had not occurred to her.
Wang Gulong let out a shout in Chinese. Jimmy translated, “It is coming!”
Elfrida whooped in relief. “OK! OK! Everyone get down!”
Rather needlessly, they all dropped flat at the edge of the ringrail canyon.
Lights blazed on the horizon. The Vesta Express was coming.
Elfrida craned over the edge.
At the bottom of the canyon, where they had dropped it, the roadheader blocked the track.
The train was on them before they could blink. Panic flooded Elfrida’s mind.
It’s not going to stop.
It’s going to hit the roadheader and derail.
People are going to die.
It’ll be my fault.
I’ll lose my job, I’ll be guilty of murder, the ISA will throw me in jail, Mom and Dad will be heartbroken, I’ll never see Glory dos Santos again—
Before that last thought could sink in, almost before she knew she had had it, the Vesta Express shuddered to a halt. It had in fact been braking as hard as possible for the last twenty minutes, ever since the pressure sensors in the track detected the obstruction. It completed this deceleration from Mach 2 to 0 kph just in time to avoid a catastrophic derailment. Its blocky white nose loomed over the roadheader. Its headlights drenched the dinosaur-like machine in an accusing blaze.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 46