“Hi.”
Elfrida screamed.
Spinning, she saw a vinge-class prance out of the access corridor.
It had followed her.
She sprinted for the nearest rover. Frantically, she worked the rear-opening airlock.
“Don’t take that one,” the vinge-class advised. “It’s almost out of juice.”
It sashayed closer, and pointed with one skeletal foreleg.
“That one over there’s a good bet.”
That one over there was parked in by the overturned rovers. But it was further from the phavatar, so she ran to it. While she waited for the hatch to open, the vinge-class started to move the rovers that would block her exit. It picked them up and tossed them aside like toys, casually demonstrating its strength.
“Why are you helping me?” Elfrida screamed.
“Angelica Lin got away. If I go after her, she’ll just frag me. But you, bein’ an old friend of hers, might could get close enough to frag her.”
“I haven’t got a weapon,” Elfrida said.
It waved a gripper prong at her. “Ho, ho. Nice try.”
The hatch squelched open. Elfrida threw her bag into the circular opening and jumped in after it.
“Lin’s heading for the spaceport,” the phavatar informed her, as the hatch began to iris shut.
“How do you know?”
“Quickest way to get off-planet. She told you something else? Tryin’ to throw you off her tail.”
The hatch sealed. Elfrida slid into the driver’s seat, in the rover’s convex windshield bubble. Outside, the phavatar stood in its bowlegged, four-square stance. She lowered her gaze to the dashboard and ran the pre-EVA systems checks. Everything seemed OK. The rover’s battery had recently been recharged, giving her 120 hours of driving time.
She put the rover into drive and accelerated straight at the phavatar.
It stepped out of the way.
But as she sped past, it broke into a gallop, keeping pace with the rover. Its four legs gave it a turn of speed equal to the little rover’s acceleration.
The vehicle airlock at the far end of the parking lot was closed. Elfrida braked. The phavatar raised a gripper and clicked its prongs. The airlock opened.
“I don’t want company,” Elfrida screamed.
The radio fizzed. “You got a problem?”
“Yes! I have a problem with you!”
“No, I meant like, psychological. Your file says you were in therapy.”
“I have a problem with being on the same planet as you.” She couldn’t believe she was talking to the Heidegger program. Having a conversation with it.
“Der Begriff ‘Sein’ ist undefinierbar. Dies schloß man aus seiner höchsten Allgemeinheit,” the radio said, coolly, and Elfrida fell silent. No, this was not a conversation. She couldn’t let herself fall—even unwillingly—into that trap.
The airlock’s massive flanges opened.
Elfrida gunned the rover into the chamber.
The Heidegger program’s mocking laughter stayed with her until she killed the radio.
★
Elfrida had not been outside Tolkien Crater since she arrived on Mercury. Now she drove through a stygian world of dark chasms and spear-like ejecta. Amid this ancient debris, Wrightstuff, Inc. had laid a road. It snaked like an Olympic skateboard course, conforming to the wayward terrain. There was no possibility of getting lost. This was the only road on Mercury.
All the same, it scared her not to know where she was. With no satellite navigation, she had no way of putting names to the features acquired by the rover’s radar. The radar built up a picture of the terrain as she drove—she seemed to be threading between two humongous mountains, which should be the rims of Tolkien and Chesterton craters—but her exhausted brain struggled to reconcile the picture on the dashboard plot with the cubist hell in the headlights.
“I don’t even know if I’m driving north or south! I need a map,” she cried, and blinked her contacts on.
NO NETWORK ACCESS.
“I know that! Enable knowledge guide. Have I got a map?”
“A map?” said her unicorn in sparkly text. “Of where?”
“The north pole of Mercury.”
“How’s this?”
A map unfolded on her contacts, overlaid on the road ahead. It was a polar projection. Call-out tags marked every feature. Animated graphics indicated four spaceports. In reality, Mercury only had two, Goethe and Yoshikawa.
“Oh my God! I know what this is! It’s from Dr. Hasselblatter’s sim.”
“That’s right! ‘Amazing Mercury: Visit The Future With Abdullah Hasselblatter.’ You downloaded it, remember?”
Yes, now she remembered. In comparison to her old contacts, these ones had a bottomless data storage capacity. All those gigabytes were just begging to be used, so she’d downloaded the freebie sim created to promote Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign.
“This is great. It is based on the real map of Mercury, right?”
“Yes! Up-to-date satellite data! And it’s got lots of fun features!”
“You can’t show my location on here, can you?”
“Sorry! No location data available.”
“That’s OK.” She zoomed in on Tolkien Crater. The map’s resolution went as high as 1:100. The road was clearly marked. Just as she had thought, she’d driven between Tolkien and Chesterton craters. But using the rover’s odometer, she calculated that she’d driven a lot further than 50 kilometers. She must have missed the turn-off for Wrightstuff, Inc.’s Chesterton hab.
“Crap! I need to go back!”
But she didn’t touch the steering yoke.
She chewed a knuckle. Thought about what she might find in Chesterton Crater.
A trap.
If the Heidegger program was besieging Mt. Gotham, why wouldn’t it also have attacked Wrightstuff, Inc’s other habs?
Other considerations aside, she’d be an idiot to do anything that Angelica Lin said.
While she pondered, she drove on.
The dashboard radar plot caught her eye. A red dot blinked on the edge of the grid, highly visible amid the altitude-coded greens of the terrain. The rover’s computer was decidedly dumb, but even it could tell the difference between a rock and a …
… moving vehicle.
Had to be.
She’d caught up with Angelica Lin.
The half-track had looked old. It was obviously slow, too. Elfrida had already eliminated Lin’s head start.
She started to accelerate, then changed her mind. She locked the radar onto the trundling half-track.
“Tell you what,” she murmured, “I’ll just hang back here, and you lead the way. ‘Kay, bitch?”
Ironically, she was now doing what the Heidegger program had said.
Follow Lin to the spaceport.
… and frag her.
Who said a homicidal AI couldn’t have a good idea from time to time?
xxviii.
Doug #2—as Grumpy Doug was technically called—lay on his back on the floor of the vault. His great-great-granddaddy had built this place, sealing off the lowest level of the mine that would eventually become Hotel Mercury. The climate-control system was entirely separate. No one upstairs could mess with it.
Doug gave thanks for Founder Doug’s paranoia.
And also for his acquisitive streak.
Digging his heels into the regocrete, he scooted his head and shoulders beneath the showpiece of Wrightstuff, Inc.’s vintage auto collection.
A jellied tangle of pipes and pans stared down at him. He found the electronic lock on the fuel line, and cut it in half with his pocket cutter laser, a mechanic’s tool.
This vehicle was a Tesla Family FOB, an American icon during the last years of the republic. A Forward Operating Base for your family, geddit? Popular with suburban moms, it mounted a roof cannon that fired exploding 60mm rounds. The driver also commanded a drum-fed machine-gun, gaze-controllable via Intuitouch™ targeting
goggles.
Doug rolled out from under the chassis. A knot of UNVRP engineers goggled nervously at him.
“You’re up, guys,” he said.
“This is an internal combustion engine!”
“This technology is medieval!”
“We don’t even know how it works!”
“Figure it out,” Doug snapped.
The circle of watchers parted. Matt, Doug’s only surviving companion, trotted through the crowd, holding his helmet like a bowl. Straw-colored liquid sloshed over the brim. “Fuel. I found it in the tank of the vintage Caddy over there. Plenty more where that came from.”
It smelled toxic, but Doug took that as a sign that it was the real thing. “We got fuel. We’re set,” he told the engineers. “All you gotta do is tell me which buttons to push.”
The engineers rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
They were just regular folk. So were all the other 400-odd civilians trapped down here.
Doug figured the Marines had stood their ground, and died. He admired them for that.
He and Matt had barely made it into the vault. They’d left Elfrida Goto in the farm—good kid, courageous as hell. Left her to die.
Jen—left her gutted on the floor.
Mark, Rob, Jim, Anne—left them fighting the vinge-classes that ambushed them in the corridor to the vault.
Doug had left them all, and run.
Because he was the only one who could open the vault.
The lock was programmed to recognize his irises and fingerprints, which were identical to Founder Doug’s.
If the vinge-classes had caught him, they could’ve used his severed head and hands to unlock the doors and get at everyone inside.
Funny thing was, when he and Matt got here, they’d found the door of the vault standing open.
He’d fixed that.
Locked it from the inside.
A while after that, the phavatars had started whaling on the door. So far, it was holding.
Talking to the survivors, he’d learned that the vinge-classes had herded them in here for safe-keeping. These were the mixed-bloods, the genetically fortunate. Or not so fortunate, recalling the Heidegger program’s activities on 4 Vesta. These people were its keep pile.
Well, now there was a locked door in the way. And just maybe, Great-Great-Granddaddy’s blastproof steel would buy them enough time to hit back.
Listening, Doug realized the noise had stopped. Uh oh. He left Matt to keep the engineers on the job, and headed back through Fine Art.
He’d turned the vault lights off to save power. In the darkness, backlights from tablets and phones illuminated strained, terrified faces. Eyes followed him as if he were their savior.
In the Natural Bounty hall, he bumped into the surviving UNVRP executives, a handful of middle-aged men and women still clad in their yellow-and-blue uniforms. They were heading for the doors, too. He fell into step with them. “What’s going on, guys?”
“Just admiring the collection,” said the senior VP for Accounting & Finance.
The Natural Bounty collection actually was impressive. Life-sized foam-core cutouts of animals and birds dotted the room. Some were extinct, some not. All were native to the former United States. A safe in the middle of the room held their genetic material. President Doug had been planning to resurrect them all, starting with the smaller animals, when his paraterraforming project got off the ground.
One of the officials was using a tablet to light their way. It suddenly said, “You have a new text message!”
“Hey!” Doug said. “You got comms?”
The official twitched the tablet away.
“Lemme see that.”
“It’s just a—a game.”
“Lemme see it, all the same.”
“No. It’s private.”
“My family owns this place.”
“Privacy. Human rights.”
Doug picked up a foam-core cutout of Alligator mississipiensis. It weighed nothing, but its base was a chunk of regocrete. Holding it by the base, he swung it at the officials, a taunt rather than a threat. The people watching from the shadows would probably take the side of the officials, if it came to a brawl. After all, these were their bosses.
But the senior VP for Accounting & Finance panicked. He broke into a run, tripped on the base of Canis lupus, and went sprawling. The tablet flew out of his hands, and Doug grabbed it.
A text conversation.
The latest text read: Knew you’d make the sensible decision. Now that’s the kind of thinking that will shape humanity’s future!
Doug lowered the tablet and stared at the executives. “‘The sensible decision.’ Now, what decision would that be?”
None of the executives answered. Doug flipped back through the older texts.
I know you got some purebloods in there, he read. They sneaked in. Some of your employees helped them hide. Send ‘em out, and we’ll let the rest of y’all live. You can’t say fairer than that.
Doug looked up. A crowd had formed around them. The senior VP for Public Relations said, “It’s the only way any of us are going to survive.”
“Yeah? And how’s that going to work?”
The senior VP looked at his colleagues. No one helped him out. “They only want the purebloods,” he said. “It’s basic math. If we try to protect them, we’ll all die.”
Doug took a beat, looking around. People stood on the climate-controlled bookcases in Literature. To his left, the oddments of Liberty & Civil Rights lined the aisle leading to the door.
A group of about twenty people stood in front of the door, guarded by the surviving UNVRP peacekeepers.
“You’ve already rounded the poor bastards up,” Doug said in disgust.
The executives said nothing.
“How can you even tell which ones are purebloods, in this light?”
“We all know each other here.”
Doug quickstepped between the displays devoted to George Washington and Martin Luther King. The executives and their flash mob followed, narrowing the distance.
As Doug got closer to the door, he saw that the surviving purebloods were all children. His disgust intensified. The survivors must have protected them, motivated by the natural human desire to protect the young. But now they were ready to sacrifice them for an illusory promise of safety.
The peacekeepers aimed their rifles at Doug. He was pretty sure they were out of charge. He’d dumped his own gun when he ran out of ammo. Now he wished he’d kept it for bluffing purposes.
He spread his palms in one of President Doug’s favorite gestures. “You don’t want to do this, guys.”
“Yes, we do,” said voices behind him.
One of the purebloods spoke up. A boy of eleven, twelve, carrying a toddler. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll go.”
Doug had never heard anything sadder.
“All our families are dead anyway.”
A muffled thud struck the doors.
While everyone cringed, Doug moved. He whipped out his pocket cutter laser, jumped the senior VP for Accounting & Finance, and dragged him back to the doors. The man’s throat quivered under his elbow. Doug braced his back against the perspex cover of the iris and fingerprint reader. “Anyone lays a finger on these kids,” he shouted, “this fucker dies.”
They kept moving towards him.
He thought of his clone-sibling, President Doug. Cloning wasn’t as exact a science as it looked; you could clone a body, but not a personality. President Doug had got all the charisma. Doug #2 had only got the scariness. But he had a lot of experience impersonating his rhetorically gifted sibling, and he drew on it.
“Welcome to America,” he told the mob. Make each of them think you’re talking to him or her alone. “Where dying is easy, greed makes good, and every last motherfucker will sell his neighbor to the devil for a few sweet lies.”
“You’re a clone,” shouted someone who knew the deal.
“Yup, I�
��m a clone. The living dead, fabbed from the DNA of a Mafia kingpin who went into politics. Welcome to America,” Doug repeated. ”Where the dead walk, and downwards mobility is the game we all play. But there’s always the chance of a comeback.”
He was developing a rhythm now.
“Most of you were Americans to begin with, before the UN wooed you away with better salaries. So you got the worst of both worlds.”
Scattered laughs.
“But I hope, I believe that there are still some of you with the faith that drove your ancestors to pioneer the stars. The courage to face death with a smile and a one-liner. The courage to defend these, your neighbors’ lives with your own. The courage to spit at the PLAN’s filthy ideology. Pureblood, not pureblood, what-the-fuck-ever. Let me tell you something.”
He paused. Silence.
“The Americans who immigrated here, were mostly purebloods. And that was a failing of our glorious country, that the rich protected their own, at the expense of everyone else. But let me tell you something else. One hundred and twenty years have passed since then. And I believe, I have faith that we’ve gotten past that. I believe in progress! I believe that now, in the twenty-third century, folks, we are courageous enough to live up to the founding principle of the United States. Race is nothing. All are equal in the eyes of God, and all are free.”
He stopped there. Had to; he was choking up.
The mob stayed silent.
Doug’s arm was cramping, so he let go of the senior VP for Accounting & Finance. The man stumbled away. Doug glanced up at the dull silver slab of the door. American engineering. Idiot-proof, nuke-proof, built to last a thousand years. He settled his shoulders against the cover of the reader.
“I’m making it easy for you to not open this door,” he said. “I’ve locked it. Can’t be opened without my eyes, my fingers. So you’ll have to cut them off me first.”
He meant it as a joke to ease the tension.
It came off as a provocation. A collective moan arose, and thickened into wails.
The mob rushed him.
Throwing punches, trying to protect the children, Doug heard a mechanical roar.
The person he was hitting vanished. The mob scattered.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 84