“Okayyy,” Elfrida said. “I can see how that would annoy people.”
The negative talk she’d heard about Wrightstuff, Inc. made more sense now. No UN insiders wanted Patel to win the directorship.
“But let’s not waste this fine day on political chit-chat, Ms. Goto! We’ve barely scratched the surface here.” Doug brought up a new set of models on the tabletop screen. “Let me tell you more about my paraterraforming project.”
★
Cydney and Angelica were on their third beer.
“Now I remember what I wanted to ask you,” Angelica said.
Alcohol worked faster in weaker gravitational environments. The mirrored walls of the Mercury Café had dissolved into a blur. Cydney focused on Angelica’s lips. It was some seconds before she remembered to listen to what Angelica was saying.
“… will you be my publicist?”
“Will I? Angie, I’d be totally honored! I’m so into what you’re about.”
Cydney had no idea what Angelica was about, to be honest. But she knew that her viddability quotient beat all the other candidates, combined. Those lips.
“Really? Really? Oh, Cyds. I’m so happy. Come here.” Angelica scooted around the table, and they hugged.
“We should get to work right away,” Cydney bubbled, “designing your campaign.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Oh my God. Whoops. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t think anyone heard. But just for safety’s sake, maybe we should go back to my suite.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.”
x.
“Well?” Vlajkovic said, as soon as they got back to their rover. “What did you think?”
Elfrida peeled her EVA suit off, stuffed it behind her seat, and sat back.
“Phew.” She blew her fringe off her forehead. “What did I think of President Doug? Well, he’s charismatic, isn’t he? I know what they mean now about electric personalities. Just being around him gave me so much energy. Did you notice I completely forgot about lunch, until he offered us sandwiches? That is not like me.” She giggled. The Doug effect had not entirely worn off yet, although she was objective enough to analyze it. “I wanted to please him.”
“Führer Kontakt,” Vlajkovic said.
“What?”
“The gift of leadership. He’s got it. Like you said, his people would do anything for him. He shook up the company, shifted their focus away from financial engineering, ramped up the microcredit business. They’re the only supermajor that will make loans to asteroid squatters, which is why everyone else badmouths them. And also why their share price is in the toilet. Some of the other executives blame Doug for that. They say he’s too ideological.” Vlajkovic reached down to the rover’s stereo and turned it on.
It was obvious to Elfrida that Vlajkovic was a 100% paid-up member of the Cult of Doug, just pretending to be objective.
“But he didn’t explain,” she said.
“What?”
She raised her voice over Vlajkovic’s execrable taste in music. “You said he’d explain everything. He didn’t.”
“Paraterraforming. That was the explanation.”
“Hmm.”
As they drove back across the crater floor, she twisted around to look at the peak of Mt. Gotham through the rover’s rear porthole. Amazing to think that there was a whole world inside there. Paraterraforming. It wasn’t as sexy as the Venus Project, but maybe it could make life better, faster, for more people.
“Do you have time for coffee at the Hobbit Hole when we get back?” Vlajkovic said.
“I really ought to put in some desk time,” Elfrida said regretfully. “I have to at least get started on my report for Dr. Hasselblatter.”
“Be a rebel. Live a little.”
“Oh, OK.”
★
The Hobbit Hole was where the lab workers hung out. Excavated from the outer wall of the intake shaft, it was a cozy cave furnished with second-hand tables and chairs. Carpets congregated on the floor, eating crumbs. The dim lighting preserved the illusion that they were in the middle of a 120-sol Venus night. Shabby bead curtains and electric candlesticks reminded Elfrida of the cafes where she’d hung out when she was at university in Paris. She sipped her coffee … and opened her eyes wide. “This is, wow. Good.”
“It’s something Sean does,” Vlajkovic said. “We have the same beans at home, but Richard can’t duplicate the wow factor. Hungry?”
She was. She had a grilled cheese sandwich, and that was also wow. Off-duty lab workers and miners stopped by to talk to Vlajkovic. They guarded their words, obviously unsure if Elfrida was a friend or an enemy, but she could see that they were yearning for some sliver of hope.
“What if you were to all move into Mt. Gotham?” she said.
“Huh? No.”
“You need somewhere to live; they’ve got plenty of space …”
“Not an option.”
“I thought you said Doug was on your side?”
“He is.” Vlajkovic hesitated. “Listen, there’s something else I need to show you. This way.”
They squeezed into the kitchen. With two of Vlajkovic’s friends watching the door, others helped him shuffle pallets aside from a concertina curtain with embedded motion sensors, set into the cave wall.
“Doug is on our side,” Vlajkovic insisted. “And here’s the proof.”
He urged her through the curtain, into another cave. This one was unfurnished and starkly lit. On the floor lay several open cases crammed with machine-guns, drums of ammunition, and pistols.
Elfrida went on her knees next to the stash. She fitted her finger into a greasy gun barrel.
“These are the same as the Little America security guys have.”
“Yeah. These rounds go through walls. You wouldn’t want to use them in an inflatable hab. But down here, we’ve got rock on all sides.”
At the far end of the cave sat one of the vinge-class phavatars used in the surface mining operation. Elfrida had never actually seen a vinge-class in the flesh (so to speak). Anodized dark purple, it was a three-meter nightmare, with six multi-jointed legs, a mouthful of industrial tools, and big Bambi eyes that were supposed to make it look friendly. The eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, filmed with dust.
“We’re gonna use the phavatars to secure our mining assets on the surface.” The speaker was one of Vlajkovic’s friends, a guy from the mining division. He had come in behind them, with several other men.
“Gotta jailbreak ‘em first,” Vlajkovic said. “We’re working on that.”
“Good luck,” Elfrida said. “Jailbreaking phavatars is impossible. Is anyone in management in on this?”
Vlajkovic sawed a hand back and forth.
“This is crazy.” She was trembling.
“You think we don’t know that?”
“And what if you do take over the hab? Then what? They’d never let you get away with it.”
“They’ll agree to our terms,” Vlajkovic said, “once they see we’re serious.” He lifted one of the machine-guns and pretended to shoot from the hip, making ba-ba-ba noises under his breath.
“And, what, the Phase Five ramp just doesn’t happen? We need that iron. The Bosch reaction requires it. We also need 3×1020 kilograms of magnesium to sequester the remaining carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus.”
“It’ll happen,” Vlajkovic said. He put the machine-gun into her hands. “It’s not loaded … No, like this.”
Elfrida staggered. The men laughed. She was handling the gun gingerly, as if it might shock her. She adjusted her grip on the stock.
“It kicks. With your smaller physique, you’d want to use the tripod. It goes around your waist, attaches to the stock, and the feet snap down on command, see? Stabilizes the weapon. Adds a few microseconds to your reaction time, that’s all.”
“The blue berets have laser rifles.”
She referred to the thirty-strong team of UNVRP peacekeepers who officially
guarded the hab and the UNVRP mining assets on the surface. The miners made rude noises to show what they thought of them.
“You’re going to get people killed.” She gave the machine-gun back to Vlajkovic and fumbled to undo the tripod from her waist.
“Sigh. All we want to do is live and let live. The sad thing is that we may need to frighten the snot out of a few bureaucrats before they’ll let us.”
Elfrida accidentally deployed the tripod’s legs. She tripped over them and landed on her hands and knees. Looked up at Vlajkovic. “So, what now?”
“What do you mean, what now?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Keep the execs off our backs. Pretend like you’re working on a resettlement plan. Stall them. We just need to delay until the election is over.”
“What difference is that going to make?”
“Doug is backing Mandy Patel, from 13882 Calcott. If she gets in, we’re golden.”
“Could she really reverse the evacuation decision?”
“Sure. Power of the gavel. The director of UNVRP is also the Inferior Space circuit judge. So we sue for unfair dismissal, she hears the case, and she decides for us. Then there’ll be no need for this junk.”
Vlajkovic helped Elfrida up. She leaned on the wall next to the switched-off vinge-class phavatar. The weight of the gun was still with her. Its lethality seemed to have left an electric residue on her palms. She wiped them down her jeans.
“I just need you to realize that we’re serious,” Vlajkovic said.
She realized, all right. She realized that she hadn’t understood Vlajkovic at all. Her first impression had been correct: he was a dangerous man. “Did President Doug give you these guns?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see what’s in it for him.”
The vinge-class’s dead eyes seemed to say: You’ll never understand.
“I can’t be involved with this.” She shook her head. “It’s just too crazy.”
She moved towards the door.
Several miners got in her way.
“Let me go.”
Vlajkovic came up behind her and cupped her chin in one hand. Bending over her, as if he were going to kiss her, he murmured, “I trusted you, Elfrida. Was I wrong?”
“N-no. You can trust me. I won’t say anything.”
She’d have promised him anything in that moment, just to be allowed to walk out of there.
“Not a word. Especially not to that girlfriend of yours.”
He let her go. The miners stepped aside. She stumbled into the hallway.
“Maybe this was a bit sudden,” Vlajkovic said behind her. “Go home and think about it.”
Elfrida burst out into the Hobbit Hole’s kitchen. In her haste to escape, she kicked a crate of nutriblocks, and a rat darted from behind it, running for its life.
23 Years Earlier. Callisto
Angelica adjusted rapidly to life on Callisto.
If you’d told her a few months ago that she would be slurping her morning Frosties without a glance at the viewport screen, she’d have said you were nuts. But Jupiter never did anything. Callisto was tidally locked to the gas giant, so it never rose, never set. Just sat there.
The same every day.
Like their routine.
That Marine had been right. On Callisto, nothing ever fucking happened.
At least the civilians had their work to keep them busy. Valhalla Base was a scientific research station run by the UN in partnership with a private-sector consortium comprised of Liquid Space, Inc., Adastra, and LGM Industries.. Liquid Space (formerly ShellGazpromExxon) operated the drilling rig, which was trying to drill all the way down through the ice to the liquid water presumed to be under there. Adastra ran the experimental hydroponics module. LGM Industries had a bunch of physicists on base, minding the unmanned probes that were floating around inside the atmosphere of Jupiter.
The only actual UN people on base were the custodians, a girl from the Space Corps, and a few UNSA geeks who spent their days in cubicles, operating phavatars that were exploring the far side of Callisto.
The private-sector scientists were all free-riding on the UN security guarantee that Angelica and the rest of B Platoon represented.
Not, Angelica thought, that there’s anything’s out here for us to protect them from.
“Just out of curiosity,” she said to C-Mutt, one day when they were out on patrol. “When’s the last time the PLAN was spotted in this volume?”
She wouldn’t have asked that question inside the base. You didn’t talk about the PLAN. Even though the PLAN was the whole reason for Space Force’s existence.
“Never,” C-Mutt said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“The PLAN doesn’t come outside of the Belt. Why would it? There’s practically no people out here.”
“So why are we here?”
“To justify the money spent on our training.” C-Mutt bounced up a ridge and landed with both feet on the ice flower at its crest. It exploded in a slow rain of sparkles. C-Mutt did a touchline dance, a Texan gorilla in an EVA suit.
“That was probably there for about a thousand million years before you came along,” Angelica said.
“So?”
They walked on, following the footprints of yesterday’s patrol. They were circling the perimeter of the base, which had been arbitrarily determined to lie at the snowline. Down here, it didn’t feel as if they were in a crater at all: Valhalla Crater was just too big. The terrain was broken. They leaped across gullies floored with snow, and detoured around boulders. On the flat, they sank ankle-deep into drifts of pulverized rock mingled with powdered ice, the mixture that gave Callisto its chocolate-brown coloration.
Ten klicks away, the base was a splash of UN blue on the snowfield. The snow looked lemon-colored in the light of Jupiter. A couple of weeks ago, Angelica had lain down and made a snow angel. She’d got dust in her neck seal, and Sergeant McWhorter had chewed her out, confined her to base for days.
Now, using her suit’s bino function, she saw a few civilians in neon-green Liquid Space EVA suits strolling between the hab cluster and the drilling rig.
“We might get attacked by pirates,” she said.
“Yeah, and aliens might land. Just chill, Lin. Use the free time to, I dunno, read a book or something.”
Fuck off, C-Mutt. I was a straight-A student. She didn’t say it. You didn’t talk about yourself, much less your past life.
“Whoa!” C-Mutt exclaimed suddenly.
“What?!?”
Zero.5 on her shoulder. Down in a bowlegged crouch, scanning her arc. Telemetry display going wild—pulse spiking, oxygen flow rate rocketing. She realized that for all her restlessness, she did not want to face an attack by pirates, or anything. Her suit painted crosshairs on the face of Jupiter.
C-Mutt laughed at her. “Cheese, Lin. Chill.”
“Asswipe! I could have shot you.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, what? Did you see something?”
The radio was silent for a long moment. “It was just something I read,” C-Mutt said.
“What? I didn’t copy anything.”
“Not a heads-up. I was reading a book, OK? Something surprised me, so I said, ‘Whoa.’”
Angelica grinned behind her faceplate. Her fellow Marine had just put himself in her power. If she revealed to the others that he’d been reading a book, he would never hear the last of it.
But …
Curiosity prodded. She hadn’t taken C-Mutt for the reading type, even though he was acknowledged to be brainy. “What’s it about?”
“History,” he said reluctantly. “Legal history. I’m kinda interested in the law. Since I got on the wrong side of it once or twice in the past. So now I’m studying it.”
“Wonders never cease. And?”
“And, well, it says here that Texas used to be part of a bigger country, called the United States of America. The most powerful count
ry in the world, apparently. So I was like, whoa! They didn’t teach us that in school.”
Angelica felt an emotion that she had not experienced since her family died. Pity. “I’d like to read that book when you’re finished with it,” she said.
“Sure.”
“But, C-Mutt? If you were reading, you weren’t looking where you were going. You weren’t watching your arc.”
“Split screen.”
“Still, that would seriously degrade your alertness. A threat might get past you.”
“What threat?”
“OK, OK. I’m just, you know. McWhorter would blow her tokamak.”
“You gonna squeal on me?”
“No.”
“You’re a true-blue Marine, Angelica Lin,” said Charles K. Pope, universally known by his nickname of C-Mutt.
xi.
Elfrida went upstairs to VIP country. On the L1 mezzanine, Mork Rapp was noodling on the piano. Elfrida leaned across the reception desk. “Which room is Dr. Hasselblatter in? I need to see him. It’s urgent.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” The receptionist subvocalized into his implanted throat mic. Listened. Nodded. “Dr. Hasselblatter is teleconferencing with Earth, Ms. Goto. You’ll have to come back later. I’m very sorry.”
“But it’s urgent. Can you get through to his campaign manager?”
The receptionist’s tone was polite, his eyes as hard as hailstones. “Don’t do this, Ms. Goto.”
Elfrida felt cold and weak. The receptionist was one of Vlajkovic’s friends.
And she’d just messed up royally.
Vlajkovic would now guess that she’d been about to run to Dr. Hasselblatter and tell him about the guns stashed in the Hobbit Hole. Which, of course, she had been.
“Sorry,” she said, backing away. “Sorry.”
She trotted down the spiral ramp.
I can’t go back to my sandcastle. That’s the first place they’ll look for me.
What if Cydney’s there? She might be in danger!
Elfrida pinged Cydney. No response.
Crap, crap, crap!
(Mendoza, she thought suddenly. Oh God, I wish Mendoza was here. Which was stupid, because John Mendoza would be no help at all if there was going to be violence.)
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 69