Elfrida had let appearances distract her from the truth that was staring her in the face.
Now, Lin’s crooked smile looked familiar.
“Wow, ma’am.” Elfrida let the Zero.5 hang from her glove. The targeting laser switched itself off.
“Oh, call me Glory.” Dos Santos got up off the floor. “I’ve missed you, Goto.”
“I almost killed you.”
“You still can if you like. But why bother? In a few hours, we’re both going to be dead, anyway.”
xxxii.
Jake had never before left UNVRP HQ. Never gone outside. Never worn an EVA suit. (Much less one that had been peeled off a dead person.) It creeped him out, although he wasn’t telling Doug that.
Doug might not have taken him along if he knew how scared Jake was.
He’d left Bette with Mrs. Aaron again. She hadn’t been part of the mob that wanted to sacrifice them to the Heidegger program. He still trusted her. You had to trust someone.
“Just stay close and don’t get lost,” Doug said.
One of Dad’s friends, a guy named Lester who worked in UNVRP’s water refinery, had claimed the other spare EVA suit. The foursome walked through the water mines. Jake kept his gaze trained on Doug’s heels. He was trying to walk exactly where Doug did, so he wouldn’t get lost.
This place was so big. Glossy black support pillars marked out endless avenues. In the hollows where they were walking, water had lain for millennia in the form of ice, until it got scraped out and turned into coffee and baby formula and drinking water. Papa had sometimes mentioned that there were organic volatiles down here, too. Comet dust, embedded in the ice. They didn’t have the equipment to reclaim that stuff, so they just refined it out and threw it away. Such a waste. Jake heard Papa’s voice in his memory. The way we do things is such a waste.
Jake’s eyes got hot, and he cried for a little while inside his helmet.
When the moment passed, he saw that they were walking along a tunnel. His neck was sticky with tears, and the inside of his faceplate had fogged up.
A voice crackled into his helmet. “Heads up, Jake.” It was Lester, the guy from the water refinery. “Far’s I know, this is a dead end.”
“Is this where we stopped drilling?”
“Oh, you’re talking about when we hit the rocky layer. No, that’s all over the place, probably the impact debris from a major collision … maybe even the one that created Tolkien Crater. This here is the tunnel that used to connect our water mine to theirs. The Americans blocked it off a few years ago.”
“We didn’t block the tunnel off,” Doug broke in. “We sealed it.”
“Whoops,” Lester said. “Thought that was a private channel.”
“You’re in Little America now. There are no private channels.”
Doug stopped. They all stopped.
Their helmet lamps illuminated a black wall. It looked like a dead end to Jake.
Then the wall split down the middle.
Glowstrip light flooded through, blue-tinged, just like home.
They walked into a broader, cleanly bored tunnel with a regocrete floor. It stayed level for a bit and then angled sharply down. Lester fingered the walls and muttered about the rocky layer.
Doug said, “We got past it.”
“So I see.”
“Imported a new drilling rig a few years back.”
“I remember. And shortly after that, you blocked off … excuse me, sealed this tunnel.”
“That’s right.”
“As if there was something,” Lester said, “you didn’t want us to know about.”
The tunnel opened out into a cavern. There was a huge chunk of gear suspended over a pit in the middle of the floor. Lester walked over to it. “A hoist?” He braced his hands on his thighs and looked down into the pit. “Guess that’s your new drilling rig down there.”
“Right,” Doug said. “Turns out the rocky layer’s only a few meters thick. Below that: ice again. There’s more water on this planet than anyone ever imagined.”
“And not only water!” Jake broke in. He finally knew what he was looking at, and he was so mad he spoke without thinking. “There’s other stuff down there, too! Embedded in the ice. I bet you’ve found a totally mega deposit of helium-3!”
For a moment there was silence. Jake regretted speaking. Maybe he was wrong.
“You nailed it, Jake,” Doug said. He sounded sad.
“Why, you—” Lester.
“How much He3 are you getting out of there?” Jake said.
“You’d have to talk to our mining crew to get the output figures. Can we move on now?”
Jake was not ready to move on. “I knew it. We used to find He3 deposits on the surface sometimes. Titchy ones. But if there’s some out there, it makes sense that there would be more in the permanently shadowed craters. Oh, God! I feel really stupid now.”
“Not as stupid as I feel,” Lester said. “You found He3 on the surface, Jake? And you never mentioned it to anyone?”
“Um. Uh …”
“Mike Vlajkovic used to bring us sacks of unrefined ore,” Doug said. “We pre-processed it and sold it on. Again, I’m not familiar with the details.”
“Clearly, I’ve been wasting my time in the water refinery,” Lester said. “I should’ve farmed the job out to my kid and gone into the smuggling business. I always wondered how Mike’s crew made such a profit off of coffee.”
“Let’s keep walking,” Doug said, his voice taut. “And be aware. Just because we haven’t been jumped yet, doesn’t mean it’s safe. I still can’t raise our people on the radio. Worst case scenario, the Heidegger program has already penetrated our infrastructure, and I don’t need to spell out for you what that means.”
xxxiii.
The boarding lounge of the spaceport was no longer silent. Elfrida and Gloria dos Santos sat crosslegged on a bench, eating pretzels and hummus from the concession stand, catching up on the last three years.
“After I escaped from the Kharbage Can,” dos Santos said, “I went to Midway.”
“Wow, I’ve always wanted to go there,” Elfrida said. Midway was the shipyard and fuel depot that floated in space at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point. Like most things in space, it had started off as a bare-bones resources operation, and grown. People said you could buy or sell anything on Midway if the price was right.
“I wasn’t there long,” dos Santos said. “I sold the Superlifter. And then I called Charlie.”
“You never mentioned him …”
They’d worked together for two years on Botticelli Station, but dos Santos had been extremely private about her personal life.
“Charlie wasn’t a part of my life when I was on B-Station. When I called him from Midway, it was the first time we’d talked in twenty years. But it was like no time had passed at all. He came to get me.”
Elfrida pushed pretzel crumbs around with a finger. They floated like grains of flour in the low gravity. Back when they worked together, she’d been in love with dos Santos. A stupid, adolescent crush, but it had stayed with her. She realized now that not even dos Santos’s betrayal had killed her feelings for the older woman.
Sternly, she reminded herself that even though this was dos Santos, it was also Angelica Lin.
But who was Angelica Lin? What had she done?
“So then you changed your identity,” she prompted.
“Right.”
“Was that Charlie’s idea, or yours?”
“All I was thinking was, how do I drop out of sight? But I had to have an identity that would hold up to public scrutiny. So Charlie used his connections to get into the Star Force archives. He replaced Angelica’s DNA record with mine.” Dos Santos spread her hands: as easy as that, the gesture said. And so it was, in an age when DNA was the bedrock of identity.
“Who was Angelica Lin, anyway? I mean, the original Angelica Lin. I guess she’s dead.”
A strange expression crimped dos Santos’s features. She
dipped a pretzel stick into her tub of hummus and ate it, her gaze downcast. “Oh yes, she’s dead.”
“Why did you pick her identity to use?”
“Because I knew her. We all knew each other. It was twenty-three years ago, but it feels like yesterday. Looking back, the Space Corps must’ve been nuts, to send an untested twenty-two-year-old to Callisto ...”
23 Years Earlier. Callisto
Mad Konstantin was in a good mood. He danced around the admin module with his favorite bot, Trix, while the bot sang an old song, music and all.
Konstantin had worked out a deal with Star Force.
C-Mutt held out his hand to Glory dos Santos, who didn’t need to be asked twice. The two of them started dancing, too. Angelica stood with her arms folded, watching the foursome trade partners.
She hated herself these days.
Couldn’t even get excited about being rescued.
Konstantin had got everything he wanted. Star Force was going to give him a ship to get away in, and 50,000 troy ounces of physical iridium.
So much for the stars and the planets, Angelica thought. All he really wants is cash.
In exchange, Konstantin had promised to let Star Force rescue the 68 people left alive at Valhalla Base.
There’s no way this is not going to go wrong.
But there was nothing she could do about it.
“Santa Claus is coming to town,” sang Konstantin, along with the tune being piped from Trixie’s mouth. “Santa Claus is coming to town!” He whirled overhead, dragging a flushed Glory dos Santos. “Whatsa matter, Angelica? Don’t you know it’s Christmas?”
It was Christmas. Christmas Eve, to be precise. They’d been cooped up in here for five months, getting thinner and sicker, their hopes of rescue dwindling. Back on Earth, people were decorating their trees and wrapping presents. The drama on far-away Callisto had vanished off the news feeds. It had been going on for too long.
When Angelica’s family was alive, they used to go to midnight Mass. Her father had belonged to Eastern Lightning, a fringey Protestant denomination, and that was where Angelica and her brothers got dragged on a weekly basis, but her mother had been raised Catholic, and once a year Geoffrey Lin had made allowances for her superstitions. They would pack into Our Lady of the Angels with the once-a-year crowd and listen to the hymns. Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel …
Tears filled Angelica’s eyes.
Everyone but her was dancing now, caught up in Konstantin’s elation. The blue-eyed kid from the software support section, whose name she’d forgotten, partnered another of Konstantin’s bots. It whirled him upside-down, and his laughter sounded like a little kid’s peal of laughter, reminding Angelica of her dead brothers.
Then the music cut out.
“Hey, Konstantin,” said the warm voice of the chief negotiator. “You guys ready to go? We’re setting the first Superlifter down in thirty minutes.”
Konstantin bounded to the comms center. “My ship first! That is our deal. I get my ship first, do you copy that, Mr. Friendly?”
“Sure, Konstantin! This is your ship. We’ve got a Farhauler waiting for you up here, just like you asked for, but it is not surface-capable, right? So you need this Superlifter to reach it.”
“And my grace period of twenty-four hours starts after I board the Farhauler.”
What did he think this was? A game of hide-and-seek? 24 hours wouldn’t make any difference to Star Force’s ability to find him, overhaul him, and frag him, as soon as the hostages were safe.
“Sure, Konstantin! That’s fair,” said the negotiator.
Anxious, no longer wisecracking, Konstantin got into his spacesuit. They all clustered around the single working viewport screen on the life support center. The Superlifter flashed down from the sky, a star falling across the face of Jupiter. It fell slower and slower, backthrusting, until it settled on the far side of Valhalla Crater. Then it went dark.
“They could’ve put it down a bit closer,” Konstantin grumbled.
He faced the hostages.
“So. This is it. I’m leaving. Anyone else want to come?”
For an instant, the only sound was the rattle of the CO2 scrubber pushing air through the torn old filter.
C-Mutt opened his mouth. “I …” His breath clouded white. “Fuck you, Konstantin.”
Angelica sagged in relief.
“Why do you gotta be right? I’m with you. I was never gonna be a lawyer, anyway.”
Angelica reeled.
The other hostages smiled in approval, as if C-Mutt had taken a brave stand, as if this was what they’d expected of him.
Angelica had expected it, too, she realized after her initial shock. She had known for some time that C-Mutt had come around to seeing the universe through Konstantin’s eyes. First the planets, then the stars …
Glory dos Santos said, “I’m in, too. I want a piece of that physical iridium.”
This was a lame attempt, in Angelica’s view, to disguise the fact that she just wanted to go wherever C-Mutt was going.
“You, my friends,” Konstantin said solemnly, “are awesome human beings. Anyone else?”
The blue-eyed kid from software support spoke up. “Um, I, well, I totally think you’re right, Konstantin. But, do you really think they’ll let you get away?”
“Sure they will,” Konstantin said.
C-Mutt and dos Santos were scrambling into spacesuits.
“But if you’re not sure whether you want to go, Derek, you should probably stay here. We need allies inside the system, as well as outside it. So, if that sounds like you, just sit tight, and we’ll be in touch.”
“OK,” the kid said, seeming relieved. Derek Lorna, that was his name. The smartest of the techies. He’d hacked the life support software to overcome the built-in margins of safety, and had manually shut down the admin module’s non-essential systems, allowing them to divert every last bit of power to air and water recycling. He’d saved their lives, basically. And he and C-Mutt, the two brainiest people in the hab, had both fallen for Konstantin’s bullshit. So, did that make Angelica stupid?
She cleared her throat.
“I’d like to come, too,” she said. “If you’ll have me, Konstantin.”
“Hey! Absolutely. And there I thought you hated my ass, Angie.”
The four of them squashed into the airlock. Even before the chamber closed, the other hostages turned away, already forgetting about them, awaiting their own rescue.
As soon as Angelica got her helmet on, C-Mutt flashed her two fingers. She hadn’t worn a spacesuit in five months, so she had to think about how to operate the comms unit. When she tuned into channel 2, he was already speaking: “… not coming with us, are you?”
“No,” Angelica admitted.
“With me and Glory using two of the EVA suits, that only leaves three working ones. Now you’ve got one of them. Nice job.”
“I plan on staying alive.”
“You’re a survivor, Private Lin.”
His use of her rank distanced them further from each other. Soon, that distance would be uncrossable. AI is the way to the stars, Konstantin had often said, and now C-Mutt believed it, too.
But Angelica knew it was a lie. Knew it deep down where her memories of her family lived, in the crypt of her heart.
The four of them tumbled down the short ladder from the airlock. Stepping onto the trampled snow, Angelica saw the wreckage of the base with her own eyes for the first time.
Frost furred the exploded shell of the experimental hydroponics module. The water vapor inside had frozen instantly when the module was ruptured. White rime coated the stems and leaves of the plants sucked out of the breach, which now littered the regolith over a fan-shaped area.
“Looks Christmassy!” Konstantin said.
Further away, the UNSA lifeboat that Konstantin had landed in stood in its own ring of destruction. Angelica could see pieces of her fellow Marines among the larger pieces of debris flung far and wide. C-M
utt made a little detour to pick up someone’s arm, frozen solid in its casing of Marine blue, and throw it. “Shame we never had time for a game of football,” he said with a chuckle.
Angelica finally realized the truth about C-Mutt: he was a dickshit. Maybe his conscience had been burnt out of him by his tough childhood, or maybe he’d never had one. Her crush on him had blinded her to the fact that he and Konstantin had been two of a kind all along.
She veered away from the others, heading for the drilling rig.
While she walked, she heard their conversation in her helmet.
Glory dos Santos said, “Hey, Konstantin. What about Trix, Jax, and the rest? Aren’t they coming?”
“Nope,” Konstantin said. “That’s why I know we’re going to get away. They’re going to stay behind, and if Star Force welshes on our deal, they’re gonna start killing people.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Well, I think that’s totally unfair on them,” dos Santos said.
Angelica shook her head. Stupid little Glory had genuinely thought that Konstantin cared about his bots as if they were people.
She reached the drilling rig and went around the operators’ module (now open to the vacuum). The pit yawned. Vacuum-hardened hydraulic cables and the shaft of the drilling head descended into the dark. She clambered down, holding onto the cables, and settled herself a couple of meters below the surface, with her feet braced against the drilling shaft and her back against the side of the pit. It cost her no energy to maintain this position in Callisto’s micro-gravity. She gazed up through her faceplate at Jupiter, looking for spaceships silhouetted against its striations.
Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel …
She could still hear the others talking.
Konstantin: “I checked this bitch out a couple of days ago. She’s good to launch.”
Dos Santos: “Aren’t we taking the Superlifter?”
C-Mutt laughed.
Konstantin: “Hell, no. They’ll have jarked it so it blows up in orbit. I’m telling you, I am way ahead of those thugs.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 86