They stood on a raised walkway that ran around the edge of a cubicle farm, like at a call center or something. And all the telepresence couches were occupied.
By dead bodies.
Freshly dead. Even if it weren’t for the infrared readings that had deceived her, Shoshanna would have known that much at a glance. Throats had been slashed, faces hacked into bloody ruins.
Dr. James made indistinct noises.
“Do not throw up in your helmet. People have died that way. Turn your back if it bothers you.”
Dr. James moved up beside her. She heard his breath rasping over the radio. “My career is finished, anyway,” he said.
“Ain’t that the truth.”
Shoshanna knew that her own career, and maybe more, depended on her making the right call, right here, right now. Her backup was still hours away. With all the satellites down, and the ground-based transmitter at the spaceport out of range, she couldn’t even call for advice. “Priorities,” she whispered to herself. “Neutralize threat, secure area, protect civilians.”
That was the ISA field agent’s official rule of thumb, and there was a reason why protecting civilians came last. The ISA was the Information Security Agency. Anyway, these civilians were beyond protecting.
Or … were they?
Not all the operators had been hacked up with a blade, she now saw. Only one in four or five.
Which just so happened to be the incidence of purebloods in the general population.
The other operators had been flung out of their couches, their telepresence masks and gloves ripped off. They were lying on the floor, and given the size of them, it was no wonder they couldn’t get up, even if they were alive.
Shoshanna saw one of them weakly struggling. She vaulted over the intervening partitions and shook the person—a woman, probably. The woman mouthed at her. Shoshanna ripped her helmet off to hear. She felt the cold on her face, heard the whooshing of the air circulation system struggling to restore normal pressure, smelled the metallic odor of fresh blood.
“Help,” the woman said. “Help! Help!”
“Who?” Shoshanna yelled. “What? When? Where’d it go?”
“I’ve lost Marmaduke. I need to get back in my couch. Help me.”
Disgusted, Shoshanna threw the woman against the nearest cubicle partition. “Cupcake,” she said.
The pained whimpers of the survivors scratched at her ears. Her heart was racing, her palms damp. Her BCI recommended an adrenergic uptake inhibitor. She distractedly authorized it to release a modest dose from the pharmacology implant under the skin of her left arm.
The Heidegger program had hijacked the phavatars that worked at the refinery.
Why hadn’t she anticipated that? Well, you couldn’t anticipate everything. But that was no excuse.
The Heidegger program was loose on the surface of 4 Vesta.
She’d failed.
She raised her helmet to her jaw. “We’re going back,” she said to Dr. James, who was sitting on the walkway. “Someone’s driving this train, and it can’t be the PLAN agent, or we’d be dead already. I assume there’s a manual control interface. So we’re going to go find whoever’s operating it, and make them stop.”
“Why?” Dr. James’s despairing monosyllable crackled from her helmet.
“Oy veh. So that we can get off, and get back to the Flyingsaucer. I need comms, doggone it, and that fucking PORMS took out all the satellites I was using, although that may have saved the rest of the solar system, so it’s a wash, I guess.”
She needed to call her controllers and make a full report, so they’d have the information they needed to act upon when they got here. In the meantime, maybe she could alert the Big Dig, and get them to use the PORMS to slag the phavatars in the open. It might be too late for that, but you hadn’t failed until you stopped trying.
“Question,” Dr. James said. “What kind of a computer program slaughters people with a knife?”
“Huh? One that sends them nuts. You don’t even need a fragment of a PLAN ship to do that. Although most BCI crash victims end up in therapy, not going on murderous rampages.”
“Yes, but where did it get the—” Dr. James interrupted himself. “Shoshanna! Watch out!”
She turned, and the knife came at her from below, a glint in her peripheral vision, giving her barely enough time to jump back. The woman she’d thrown to the floor was moving like a killer whale, fast, hacking at her legs. And all over the room the other survivors were rolling and surging and slithering towards her, their obese bodies sailing through the air like porpoises, several metric tons of flying cupcake converging on her in three dimensions.
Micro-gravity gave the wrong people all the advantages.
Shoshanna had combat training. What she did not have was a decent weapon. To be caught with a laser pistol would have wrecked her cover as a student activist. She had a home-printed revolver with three bullets in it. She leapt into the air to avoid the woman on the floor, and fired all three bullets in rapid succession into the nearest oncoming cupcakes. Then she threw the revolver at a fourth one. They didn’t even slow down. In the corner of her eye she glimpsed flashes. Dr. James was shooting at the cupcakes with his prosthetic gun.
She made a cold calculation that the odds were insurmountable.
“Run!” she yelled. “Tell them it’s loose!”
She did not see whether Dr. James obeyed her or not. The cupcakes were on top of her. Slowly, as in a nightmare, struggling all the way, she was smashed to the floor.
She lay half on a telepresence couch, her head hanging off its edge. Obese bodies pinned her limbs. A man sat on her chest. He had a transistor tattoo on his bald skull. “Are we having fun yet?” he grinned.
Shoshanna commanded her BCI to euthanize her. The dose loaded in her subdermal store was kinder than over-the-counter peace pills. Supposedly.
~Are you sure? her BCI queried. It would not let her take this drastic step without double-checking.
“Yes!” Shoshanna screamed. The cupcakes were fumbling around her head, trying to force a direct-connection telepresence wire into her temple port.
“Oh, good,” said the man sitting on her chest. “We are, too! The more, the merrier.”
~Please confirm you are of sound mind and not under duress or emotional distress, said her BCI.
Too late. The wire had slipped home. Shoshanna Doyle would never be of sound mind again.
“Cancel euthanasia command,” she said, sitting up. “Just joking!”
★
Far away from the Vesta Express, the phavatar modelled after the porn star Marmaduke Shagg stood outside the Bremen Lock. It was accompanied by a baker’s dozen of its fellows. They had run as fast as they could to get here, but they were not tired, needless to say. They were machines. They had stopped only once, at the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport, to recharge themselves.
That had been fun.
(Phavatars, independent of their operators, had no sense of fun. But the entity now operating these phavatars did.)
Marmaduke Shagg hefted the anti-spacecraft cannon they had ripped from its mounting at the spaceport.
Then he froze. All the phavatars froze, sagging in awkward postures.
The sky curved blackly over them. There were no satellites up there any longer to distract from the awesome beauty of the stars.
(Not that phavatars had a sense of beauty, anyway.)
In front of them, the airlock’s external gates spanned the gap between the rock and the mushroom-cap overhang of the Bellicia ecohood’s roof. Wrought from asteroid iron, the gates depicted woodland animals and children frolicking around the Virgin Atomic logo. This artistic flourish mirrored the aspirations of the ecohood’s founders, recorded in a form impermeable to the cynicism of subsequent generations. The gates still reminded everyone who passed beneath of their dependence on a FUKish aerospace company whose good intentions were matched only by its self-promotional zeal.
(If the phavatars
had been capable of any emotions at all, they might have felt a flicker of gratitude at being freed from that dependence.)
The sun peeked above the horizon, slapping their shadows through the gates.
Marmaduke Shagg lowered the cannon. They all walked forward.
The gates swung open.
The airlock admitted them.
★
Back on the Vesta Express, Elfrida was trying to warm up by doing jumping jacks when Rurumi interrupted her.
“I’m in. But my hair is ruined!”
“Huh?”
“The repair bots are fixing the airlock. I had to wiggle past them. I’ve got splart in my hair!”
“When this is over, I’ll introduce you to my hairdresser. You’d look great with a pixie cut, in my opinion.” A moe-class was a moe-class, and so Elfrida took a few seconds to reassure Rurumi, although she was twitching with urgency, as well as shivering with cold. “Go to the driver’s cab. Mendoza hasn’t been responding to my pings. I want to make sure he’s OK.”
She maximized the optic feed as Rurumi scuttled from the vestibule to the atrium. She nervously watched the phavatar’s peripheral vision for any sign of life. But nothing stirred, except bits of trapped litter. The draught had stopped. With the airlock repaired, the train was no longer losing atmosphere. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much left to lose.
★
Kiyoshi had locked himself into the bridge of the Unicorn to keep his passengers from bothering him. But he couldn’t lock Jun out.
“Call her,” the ghost said, buried from the waist down in Kiyoshi’s workstation, so that Kiyoshi’s hands went through him.
“Get out of my way.”
“Call Elfrida. Tell her we’re here.”
This was not strictly true, but it would be in another few seconds. The backthrust phase of its trajectory complete, the Unicorn was decelerating into orbit around 4 Vesta.
Kiyoshi was interested in what else he could see around the protoplanet. Or rather, what he couldn’t see. A massive asteroid like this, with a large settled population as well as active mining operations, should’ve been orbited by dozens if not hundreds of satellites. His scanners had only found two.
“I thought you were talking to the other guy,” he said to Jun. “Mendoza? He’s the one driving the train, isn’t he?”
“He was. He’s not responding anymore.”
Kiyoshi looked up from his screens. “That’s not good.”
“No. It’s not.”
At that moment an unknown ship pinged them. “XX Longvoyager-class general-purpose transport Unicorn, registered to Loyola Holdings, Inc. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Over.”
★
Elfrida screamed and clapped her hands over her eyes.
“You d-d-do scream a lot,” Satterthwaite said. “‘S a waste of energy, you know. No one’s c-c-coming.”
With her eyes shut, she couldn’t see the ghastly information from Rurumi’s optic feed. But it was burnt into her brain. The door of the driver’s cab stood open. Mendoza lay face down outside it in a pool of vomit.
“There’s nothing in my action parameters for this!” Rurumi texted pitifully. “Help! Please, Elfrida!”
Elfrida’s forced herself to look again. Mendoza’s face was cyanotic. She told Rurumi to carry him into the driver’s cab. Not that that would bring him back to life, but she couldn’t just leave him there on the floor. Why on earth had he left the cab? Oh, Mendoza!
“We’re going really fast,” Rurumi texted, staring fearfully at the monitors. The sides of the canyon were a gray blur.
“Yes, Rurumi, we’re going fast.” Elfrida looked at the array of manual controls. She turned to Satterthwaite. “Listen, you. I know your head hurts and everything, but it’s time for you to pull yourself together and freaking help. The TEOTWAWKI option?”
“Błaszczykowski-Lee’s idea. I never liked it. Smacks of suicide.” Satterthwaite shivered. “I don’t want to die.”
“We aren’t going to die. A friend of mine is coming to get us.” Or, to get the Heidegger program. But Elfrida kept that to herself. She didn’t have a whole lot of options now, apart from ignoring her suspicions about Kiyoshi Yonezawa and hoping for the best. “He’ll take us off, and then … well, we can worry about that later. First we have to launch this whole doggone module into space. I’m in the cab, but I don’t know what buttons to push, anything. Help me.”
“Oh God,” Satterthwaite said, chafing his hands. “Can you see the propulsion systems monitor?”
xxxv.
When the unknown ship hailed them, the Yonezawa brothers swung into a well-rehearsed routine. Jun minimized the propellant flow so their engine would look even weaker than it was. He also instructed their repair bots to head for the cargo bays, ready to jettison the construction materials and D/S bots they were carrying if necessary. Meanwhile, Kiyoshi responded. “XX unidentified ship, we are slingshotting around 4 Vesta on a trajectory with the following heliocentric parameters.” He made some up. “It’s called fuel economy. What’s your excuse?”
The ship responded after twenty-three seconds, which either meant that it was six million kilometers away, allowing three-ish seconds for reaction time, or else that it was trying to make him think it was. “Hey, bud, no offense meant. Long as you’re not planning to land on 4 Vesta. Be advised, you do not want to do that at the present time.”
“It’s the ISA,” Kiyoshi said to Jun. “They’re either six million kilometers from here, or trying to make us think they are.”
“My scans aren’t picking up anything closer than four million klicks, and that’s just a cycler. There’s something farther out, approaching on a direct trajectory from the inner system. Could be them.”
“Another word of warning. If you pick up any communications from 4 Vesta while you’re in the volume, ignore them. There’re some bad actors down there, and they may be targeting innocent bystanders, so don’t be that bystander, Unicorn. ‘Kay?”
The ISA agent had not announced his identity, but he was making no effort to hide it. Only the ISA would emerge from nowhere to deliver cryptic warnings on the assumption that they would be obeyed. It was kind of like running into the PLAN. You knew they were out there, and you hoped you’d never meet them. But when you did, you knew immediately what you were dealing with.
“How long before they get here?” Kiyoshi said to Jun.
“About two hours, if I’m looking at the right ship. They’re coming like a bat out of hell.”
“Still, I’m gonna assume it will be a while before we’re in range of whatever weaponry they’ve got.”
“I’d feel safe making that assumption, yes. What have you got in mind?”
Kiyoshi did not answer. He was high on another of his custom drug cocktails, a blend of meth, caffeine, and L-carnitine, which he thought of as an awareness enhancer. He said to the ISA agent, “Guess you got caught napping, huh?”
“What’s that, Unicorn?” the response came twenty-two seconds later.
“That’s what your wife says,” Kiyoshi sent back, and jammed his shoulders into the depths of his couch, laughing.
“That was stupid,” Jun said, arms folded.
“I was just jerking his chain. You’ve got no sense of humor. That was your problem when you were alive, and it still is.” Kiyoshi sobered down. “Look, they’ll try to slag us as soon as we’re in range. All that nicey-nice bullshit is just to put you off your guard. They won’t want to take the chance that the Heidegger program may have infected us.”
“I wouldn’t disagree with that analysis.”
“I’m going to call the boss-man. I didn’t want to tell him what we’re doing here, but maybe he can talk to them.”
Jun’s face was unreadable. No one could do poker-face like the ghostly self-projection of an MI.
“You talk to Elfrida. If she can’t pull off the emergency launch, all this is for nothing.”
“You talk to her,” Jun said.
&
nbsp; “I know you don’t want to do it,” Kiyoshi roared. “Suck it up! You’re a freaking machine intelligence. You don’t need me holding your hand!”
Jun vanished.
Kiyoshi set his teeth. He radioed the boss. While he waited out the signal delay, he watched for signs of Jun’s activity, but saw none. His screens merely displayed automated status reports as the Unicorn orbited Vesta in search of the train.
Well, either Jun would call Elfrida, or he’d hide in the sim and sulk. Either way, he couldn’t stop Kiyoshi from prepping the guns.
★
Rurumi perched on the driver’s couch, entering the commands that Elfrida relayed to her from Satterthwaite.
“Find the electromagnetic suspension control panel. It’s in Electrical Subsystems. Look, over there, I see it. The ES controls should already be on manual. Yes? Good. You’re doing great, Rurumi. Definitely more than just a pretty face …” Elfrida broke off her soothing flow of text. “What’s wrong?”
Rurumi’s optic feed showed that she had scrambled off the couch. She peeked around the door of the driver’s cab. “Someone’s coming!”
Down the corridor walked a person in a high-fashion coverall with a loose, translucent outer layer, accessorized with boots, gloves, and a bubble helmet. Behind the lightly tinted faceplate Elfrida made out the face of Shoshanna Doyle.
Shoshanna smiled and held out her hands.
“She’s talking to me,” Rurumi texted. “She says everything’s going to be OK!”
Another couple of seconds and Shoshanna would be in grabbing range. Elfrida wavered for barely a millisecond. Shoshanna had taken Cydney hostage. However she’d gotten aboard the Vesta Express, Elfrida was pretty sure she hadn’t come to rescue them. She typed faster than she ever had in her life.
Rurumi jerked back into the cab, slammed the door, and locked it from the inside.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 55