Up through Liberty & Civil Rights rolled the Tesla Family FOB, mobile for the first time in a century. It barely scraped between the pillars. Its cannon knocked the ceiling. Bits of foam-core animals were trapped in its tyres. Its engine made a noise like ice cracking.
Matt popped his head out of the command hatch. “You called, boss?”
xxix.
Elfrida stayed twenty-odd kilometers behind Angelica Lin. Sometimes, she lost the halftrack in the jumbled terrain, but the radar always picked it up again. There was, after all, only one road.
As the highlands flattened out, Elfrida glimpsed the halftrack’s headlights ahead of her, softened by dust.
Still on the road.
Definitely heading for the spaceport.
Maybe she had accomplices waiting for her there.
Elfrida again considered trying to stop Lin before she reached the spaceport, but how? That halftrack could drive over her rover like it was a speed bump. She’d have to wait until Lin emerged from her armored shell.
Despite her tension, the journey was monotonous. The rover had no autodrive, so she couldn’t even grab some sleep. To keep herself awake, she played with Dr. Hasselblatter’s sim, in split screen mode at first … and then, when she realized how granular it was, in full-screen 3D mode. At first, she kept flicking it out of the way to see where she was. But the sim seemed to be perfectly faithful to the topography outside, so after a while she just left it running.
There was plenty to look at. During Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign, the sim had been publically editable. Even in this polar region, far from the proposed path of the city-on-rails, inventive (and self-promotional) contributions abounded. Billboards lined the road. The ridges sported solar wind-chimes, copies of prehistoric hill figures, and the odd LULZ FROM EARTH/GANYMEDE/THE BELT inscribed in Comic Sans.
Elfrida liked the robot bison best. They were so realistic that she felt bad for driving straight through them.
It was at this point that she noticed something fairly obvious:
She could see the bison.
They were illuminated by daylight.
A bolt of shock shot through her. “Oh, no,” she screamed, and blinked the sim away.
She sat in sunlight. A circle of pale green light covered her from knees to chest. The rover’s windshield had automatically darkened as much as it could, but the light was still getting through.
Whimpering, she slapped the dashboard.
** Temperature logger data **
Interior: 20.0° C
Rear axle measurement point: -81.8° C
Roof measurement point: 42.6° C
The list of measurement points went on, demonstrating a huge differential between the parts of the rover that were in shadow and those that were now in daylight.
“Forty-two degrees. Forty-two degrees.” Elfrida took a breath.
It was a hot day in Sicily on the roof of her rover, but she wasn’t about to go up in flame.
Tentatively, she reduced the filtration on the windshield and rear porthole.
The light changed from chartreuse, to honeydew, to incandescent white.
Outside, wrinkles in the lava plain cast endless shadows, making them look higher than they were—the small-planet effect. Mercury’s relatively tight curvature made shadows proportionally longer. The sunlight revealed the planet in its true colors. Gray, gray, gray. A thousand shades of gray, from gunmetal to blinding. Elfrida’s eyes watered from the brilliance reflected off the rocks.
She restored the filtration. Then she squeezed down onto the floor of the rover, into that pool of pale green light, and peered up.
The sun floated in the black sky, two and a half times larger than it appeared from Earth. It looked like a lime. The really impressive sight would have been sunrise, when a corona of visible rays shot up over the horizon.
“I missed it,” she said. Then shouted. “I missed it! Double dog danggity-dang! Fuck-a-doodle-doo!”
How Cydney would have laughed at her.
Her one and only chance to see the sunrise on Mercury, and she’d missed it because she was playing with a sim.
Elfrida laughed at herself, because Cydney wasn’t there to do it. Then she got back in the driver’s couch and steadied the steering yoke between her knees, while she consulted the odometer and the compass and the map.
“Average speed of 30 kph … I crossed that big wrinkle ridge … now I’m here, in the Goethe Basin …”
The stupid part was that she hadn’t realized in advance that she would be driving across the terminator, into day.
She’d just been following Angelica Lin.
She frowned at the halftrack, now visible as a darker blob on the green plain ahead.
When they arrived on Mercury, Goethe Spaceport had been on the nightside. But of course, the terminator had moved since then. That was why Mercury had two spaceports, on opposite sides of the planet. When one was in darkness, the other was in daylight. According to Elfrida’s calculations, it was now a nice sunny day at Goethe Spaceport, and had been for about two weeks.
So why the hell was Angelica Lin going there?
Roof measurement point: 44.8° C
Getting toasty.
Elfrida looked up the rover’s manufacturer’s specs. These claimed that the rover had an operating temperature range similar to a good EVA suit: -150° C ~ 120° C. Since manufacturer’s specs tended to be optimistic, Elfrida figured she was good up to 100° C, and that would be pushing it.
She looked at her hands in the pale green light. The tendons on the backs of them cast darker green shadows. They looked sickly, a rotting corpse’s hands, as if she were dead already.
She drove on.
xxx.
The idiot-proof, nuke-proof door slammed back in its grooves. The Family FOB clanked forward, its main cannon blazing.
The vinge-classes clustered outside the doors. Like rats around a recycling chute, Doug thought. The ones in front scampered backwards. They collided with the ones behind them. The narrow corridor packed them into a mass. Matt, in the gunner’s seat, didn’t even need to use the Intuitouch™ targeting system.
“Die die fucking die die die,” he screamed.
The 60mm cannon’s exploding rounds smeared the vinge-classes over the walls. Shrapnel bounced off the Family FOB’s bulletproof windshield. Smoke filled the corridor, flames flickering inside the greasy billows.
They ran out of ammo.
Doug wondered if he’d be deaf for life, or only for the next couple of weeks.
“Hold it, hold it,” he yelled.
The smoke cleared. The corridor was littered with rubble that had fallen out of the roof, and fragments of phavatar. A silvery sheen of atomized components covered the walls. Something moved on the far side of the rubble mound. A surviving phavatar, trying to crawl.
Doug trod on the accelerator, planning to run it over. The Family FOB juddered forward—and got stuck in the doorway of the vault, half in and half out.
“Shit!” Doug shouted, killing the engine.
He blasted the surviving phavatar with the driver’s machine-gun, and then leapt out. Shaded his eyes against the FOB’s headlights.
Stuck, all right. Too wide to get out. Fumes filled the air with that acrid, old-timey reek.
Matt climbed out of the driver’s side door, the only one that could open. “How did they get it in?” said a wee voice, while Matt’s lips flapped.
“This isn’t the only way in,” Doug told him. This was Doug-only information, but fuck it. “The vault joins up with the water mines. They moved the collection in through the tunnels. It was sealed up after that.”
A few brave survivors climbed out over the roof of the Family FOB. They shouted for joy when they saw what had happened to the phavatars.
“This wasn’t all of them,” Doug cautioned. “I don’t know how many there were to start with, but …”
“Eighty-three,” said a boy’s voice. It was the pureblood Doug had spoken to before. He had someh
ow clambered over the Family FOB with his baby sister in his arms. “I’m an UNVRP phavatar operator. There were eighty-three to begin with.”
Doug took another look at him. “Are you Vlajkovic’s kid?”
“Yes. I’m Jake. This is Bette.”
“Sorry for your loss.”
“That’s all right,” Jake said stiffly.
The awkward moment was curtailed by the collapse of the tunnel roof.
Doug slammed Jake and his sister to the ground, shoved them under the Family FOB, and rolled in after them. The tunnel collapsed toward him like a wave breaking. Rocks bounced off the Family FOB’s hood and bunny-hopped across the floor. Doug cupped his hands over the baby’s head.
When the noise stopped, they were still alive, but the tunnel had vanished. A wall of jumbled rock fragments started where the overhang of the door structure stopped. The end of the Family FOB’s cannon was buried in it. Dust fouled the air.
The baby was crying.
They squeezed back over the top of the Family FOB into the vault, together with the few others who’d escaped for all too brief a moment.
“Well,” Doug said, “we’re not losing atmosphere, so I’m making two assumptions. One, the collapse did not damage the structural integrity of the hab. Two, it would be harder than I thought for the Heidegger program to break in through the roof of the vault. So y’all are probably safe in here for a while.” Until the air runs out, he thought.
“But how are we going to get out?” people shouted.
“I’m getting to that. I am going to return to Mt. Gotham. When I left, we were under siege. I assume that situation is ongoing, although we have no way to know for sure. So, apart from my concern for my own people, that’s where I’ve got to go to finish the job.”
He waited out the complaints from people who had been ready to murder him ten minutes ago.
“There’s another exit back there, but don’t get too excited: it leads to the tunnels. Which are, of course, unpressurized. We only have a couple of spare EVA suits. So I can take two of y’all with me, but no more. Any volunteers?”
“Me,” said young Jake Vlajkovic-Gates, surprising Doug not at all.
xxxi.
Elfrida ate one of the meals-in-pouches from her stash, squeezing up the pouch with one hand, steering with the other, keeping an eye on the sim in her split screen. Suddenly, there it was: Goethe Spaceport. A vast, titanium-colored building whose asymmetrical roof evoked a spaceplane with its nose tipped up for takeoff.
She blinked the sim away.
Nothing.
A few seconds later she saw the real spaceport. A low-slung blister. Its blanket of rubble, for deflecting radiation, made it the same gray as the landscape. Its shadow was a crescent of night.
From that shadow protruded the rear end of Angelica Lin’s halftrack.
“OK,” Elfrida murmured. “Here goes nothing.”
She’d been driving for 16 hours straight. But now her tired body kicked out adrenaline, pushing her into a tense crouch. She accelerated. The feel of the terrain under the wheels changed. She was driving across the runway.
There were no spaceplanes at the terminal. No ships at all.
Well, of course there weren’t. The roof measurement point of the rover now logged 62.7° C. The spaceport staff must have relocated to Yoshikawa, on the nightside, weeks ago.
And it looked like Angelica Lin’s accomplices—if she had any—hadn’t arrived yet.
Elfrida parked the rover alongside the halftrack. She tied her hair back, so it wouldn’t float into her eyes, and pulled the hood of her EVA suit over her head. It inflated into a bubble.
She checked the contents of her (actually Lin’s) handbag, and hooked it over her elbow.
… an old friend of hers … an old friend …
Gritting her teeth, she checked her seals and climbed out of the airlock.
Even before her boots hit the ground, her suit exclaimed, “Yow! I am registering extremely high levels of solar radiation and an ambient temperature of 64.2 degrees! I don’t like this!”
Great. The suit had a personality.
“Please return to safety right now,” it whimpered.
Even with her faceplate darkened to black, Elfrida dared not raise her eyes from the ground. The rock underfoot, itself, was almost too bright to look at. She hurried into the shadow of the terminal. “Whew!” her suit said. ”That’s better.”
When she landed here a month ago, a bus had transferred the passengers to the terminal via a direct-dock airlock. She stumbled through the preternatural gloom until she spotted the gap in the rubble blanket. She scrabbled at the non-user-friendly control panel set into the rubble wall.
The airlock valved open.
She stepped in, gripping her handbag. Waited.
The other end of the chamber opened. There stood Angelica Lin, in a spaceport worker’s coverall rolled down to the waist. Her undershirt showed off thin, toned arms. Her lips moved.
Elfrida removed her helmet. The air smelt stale, with a hint of curry. Restaurants in space always used lots of spices.
“That’s mine,” Lin said, nodding at the handbag.
“I know. I took it to carry the stuff from the emergency locker.”
“What emergency locker?”
“The one in your office.”
Lin grimaced. “I didn’t really have time to get familiar with the place.”
“Well, that’s where I got this suit. And some food and stuff. But there wasn’t a rucksack to carry it all in.”
“You’re kidding. That’s a major oversight.”
“Yeah. I guess they expect people to get into the Personal Survival Capsule and sit tight.”
“All personnel, remain where you are,” Lin intoned.
Elfrida shivered. That phrase always made her remember the PLAN attack on Botticelli Station, where she’d had her first brush with death. “Everything else went pretty much like you said,” she continued. “There was a phavatar in the parking lot. But it let me take one of the rovers. In fact, it helped me get away. Weird, huh?”
“Where’s Cydney?” Lin said. Their voices overlapped, echoey in the empty terminal.
“She didn’t come.”
“She’s a smart cookie.”
“Yeah.” Elfrida paused. “I have a question. Did you really care about her? Or did you just want to take her away from me?”
“Oh, Goto,” Lin said.
“What? I asked you a question. Did you ruin my life on purpose, or just because you didn’t give a shit?”
“I hoped you would realize she was wrong for you.”
“That’s so doggone condescending. You don’t even know me.”
Lin’s voice rose. “Do not ever, ever accuse me of not giving a shit. I’m here because I gave a shit. Somebody had to.”
Elfrida spotted the mysterious pelican case on a nearby bench. Beside the case lay Lin’s EVA suit, folded. Under the bench were the bloodstained clothes Lin had been wearing. She must have been desperate to get out of them.
And from under the wadded clothes poked the Zero.5.
Elfrida dived for it. Lin hadn’t expected that, but she reacted fast. She dived, too, and their hands closed on the weapon at the same time. They rolled together onto the floor, face to face. Elfrida got one foot against Lin’s stomach and pushed, but Lin’s hands stayed fast on the gun.
“Let’s not have an accidental discharge in here,” Lin panted.
“Let go!”
“I mean it, Goto! I don’t know how good the containment is.”
Elfrida’s reply was a grunt, scaling into a scream as she exerted all her strength to pry Lin’s hands off the gun. She had an advantage: she was wearing EVA gloves. It might have been a disadvantage, as it made her that bit clumsier, but this high-end suit had twisted polymer fibers embedded in the fingers of its gloves, giving her the powerful grip of a machine. One by one, she bent back the manicured digits that were wrapped around the trigger guard.
>
Lin let go and scooted back on her ass, grimacing in pain.
Elfrida jumped up, holding the Zero.5. It was a Marine weapon, so no safety. Point and shoot, she rehearsed in her mind.
“Go on, then,” Lin panted, glaring. “Do it.”
“Are you sorry?” Elfrida demanded.
“What? Oh. You still think I killed all those people. Yes, I am sorry, but not for that.”
“For what, then?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Just get it over with.”
Elfrida knew Lin was making a last-ditch attempt to manipulate her.. But she was the one with the gun now. Nothing Lin said could change that. “Why did you come here? Is someone coming to pick you up?”
“Ha, fucking ha. No, I was hoping there’d be a ship here. A Flyingsaucer. Something.”
“And if there had been? Where were you planning to go?”
“Luna,” Lin said, her eyes fluttering closed.
“In a Flyingsaucer?”
“I never said I had a plan. I’d have made a sub-orbital hop to the nightside. See if I could find something better at Yoshikawa. But there aren’t any ships here, so that’s that.”
Luna, Elfrida thought. She remembered Grumpy Doug asking her if she’d made any enemies on Luna lately.
Screw it. She had let Lin stall her long enough.
She levelled the Zero.5. The change in her stance activated the targeting laser. A red dot bobbled over Lin’s chin.
“Wait,” Lin said, twisting her face out of the way. “Before you shoot me, you might want to know who you’ll be killing.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, hell, Goto. That suspicious look on your face, I remember it so well. Funny thing is, it still hurts.”
Elfrida lowered the Zero.5. Her mind reeled. She stared at Angelica Lin’s luscious, haggard features.
“I had a lot of surgery. Had to change my face completely, to throw the ISA off my trail. Even got my irises done.”
“I don’t believe it.”
But even as Elfrida spoke, she knew that Lin was telling the truth. “Gloria dos Santos,” she whispered. “Ma’am.”
Angelica Lin was Gloria dos Santos, who’d been Elfrida’s boss on Botticelli Station.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 85