“Wow,” said Jake Vlajkovic. He gaped at the stairstepped cliffs of habitations, the power lines and laundry lines and safety nets and rickety bridges spanning the chasm, the crows riding updrafts from the vents. Through the kid’s eyes, Doug saw it all afresh. It was pretty wild, wasn’t it? Little America. He was proud of what they’d achieved here.
President Doug stood at the apex of the bridge, beneath the faux-marble arch they brought out for special occasions, giving a speech. Doug used his retinal implants to access the live feed from the bridge cameras. You didn’t need big screens when everyone had a screen on their eyeballs.
Close up, President Doug’s face gleamed with sweat. Doug caught the words bouncing from the tannoy … “a historic victory, folks …”
Leaving his companions behind, he shoved through the crowd. Folks made way for him, scowling in confusion. As a general rule, only one Doug ever appeared in public at a time. The existence of the clones was Mercury’s worst-kept secret, but they had to pretend there was only one of them.
Screw that. Doug mounted the bridge. The Secret Service blocked his way. These guys and gals were fanatical presidential loyalists. He stared into a pair of mirrored sunglasses. “’Bout four hundred people are stuck in the vault of UNVRP HQ without food or water, and pretty soon, without air. We need to be helping them, not basking in the awesomeness of our own selves.”
“They downloaded the Heidegger program off the internet.”
“If folks deserved to die for being stupid, y’all would have been recycled for your proteins a long time ago.”
He pushed past the Secret Service, and they let him. After all, he was Grumpy Doug, the president’s right-hand clone.
From the top of the bridge, he saw that people were hanging over the walls on both sides of the river, vidding the Barge of Shame—Little America’s jail.
The cage was gone. In its place was a modernist sculpture made of vinge-classes.
There had to be twenty of them, all splarted together, crampon-toes sticking out at angles. Here and there, a Bambi-eye stared blankly at the sun-lamps.
Doug gritted his teeth. Who does he think he is, Julius Caesar?
He tapped the president on the leg. ~Trouble, he subvocalized over their private channel. (There was one; just one.)
The long-established trust between them prevailed over President Doug’s desire to go on charming his people. He cracked one more joke and stepped down from the pedestal. ~What? he subvocalized, via the transducers implanted in Doug’s ears.
Simultaneously, Dopey Doug stepped up onto the pedestal and continued the president’s speech. He was wearing exactly the same thing as the president—desert-pattern BDUs, like something out of World War III (it had been Founder Doug’s favorite costume). Of course, those watching would have noticed the switch. But they accepted it. The best illusions weren’t even lies.
Doug nodded at the vinge-classes floating on the Barge of Shame. ~How’d you do it, Doug?
~Bro, I went out there and gave a speech. It killed ‘em. President Doug grinned, all juiced up from addressing the crowd.
~Seriously.
~Seriously, President Doug confirmed. ~I went out there and talked to them. One space cowboy to another.
Doug sucked his teeth, refusing to smile. ~Have we got comms?
~With Earth? Nope. All the sats are down. Got guys up top right now, trying to set up a line-of-sight relay through the Belt. President Doug’s face darkened. ~I’m telling you, Star Force is gonna have some ‘splainin’ to do. Instead of coming to our aid, they just fragged our satellites, and have you heard about … OK, he’s coming to that. Listen.
A burst of solemn music shifted the mood. With every appearance of woe, Dopey Doug explained that he had just received calamitous news. The Heidegger program had destroyed the twilight-zone factories operated by Centiless Corporation, Inc., LGM Industries, Adastra, Inc., GESiemens GmbH, and Huawei Galactic. In other words, all of them.
“No survivors,” Dopey said, long-faced.
~Is that true?
~Yup. We’ve known it for a couple of hours. We picked up their last communications.
~God damn. This is the AIpocalypse.
Doug didn’t actually believe that.
Nor did he believe that President Doug had been enslaved by Martian neuroware.
He knew the president like he knew himself, and with their faces inches apart, he felt satisfied that there was nothing wrong with President Doug … apart from what had been wrong for years and years.
~We’re gonna need a doggone good explanation for why it spared us, he subvocalized. ~The rest of the system isn’t gonna buy ‘Doug Wright’s oratorical skills.’
President Doug looked worried. ~You figure we should’ve made more of a meal of it?
With chills dripping down his spine, Doug subvocalized, ~I think first of all you should tell me how we pulled this off.
~OK. President Doug paused while everyone cheered a flourish of Dopey Doug’s about ‘we alone stand triumphant.’ ~Here comes my money line. I wanted to deliver it … Oh, well. What one of us accomplishes, all of us accomplish.
“On this saddest of days,” Dopey declared, “we must accept the responsibility that fate has given us: Once again, Mercury is ours!”
~He needed to wait another beat there. Half the folks won’t have heard that … I can see you’re pissed that I kept you in the dark. I apologize. I had no choice, Doug. I signed a non-disclosure agreement. But you’re my number-one sib; we’re like this, huh? President Doug held up crossed fingers to symbolize their close relationship. ~It just plain feels wrong not to tell you. So …
He told Doug the truth.
xxxvi.
Elfrida ran, pulled off-balance by the bags she was carrying. Even with her faceplate filtration maxed out, her eyes reflexively squeezed shut against the glare from the rocks. Her suit squealed, “Oh, my! It’s hot!”
Dos Santos was a tarry streak alongside the blur of the Sunmersible. Sunlight bathed the back half of the vehicle, where the airlock hatch was. Elfrida waded through the glare with her eyes closed.
Dos Santos grabbed her wrist and hauled her inside the airlock.
Her suit said, “Whew! That’s better! Please do not expose me to high temperatures for protracted periods! It’s not safe!”
While the airlock cycled, Elfrida sorted out the bags she’d been carrying. The souvenir totes of supplies were OK, but Angelica Lin’s pink leather handbag was now two-tone. The sun had scorched one side of it black.
Dos Santos squirmed out the other end of the airlock. Elfrida pulled off her helmet. “How hot is it out there? This suit has an EVA For Dummies interface. It thinks I can’t handle any actual figures.”
“95 degrees C.” Dos Santos settled into the driver’s seat. “It’s half past seven in the morning, local time. Bear in mind that the Mercurian day is 180 Earth days long.”
The interior of the Sunmersible was cramped, hinting at how thick its hull was. The air smelled funky, but felt cool. Bundles of exposed coolant pipes snaked over the walls and ceiling. Elfrida bent double to get past a noisy ceiling-mounted box fan. When dos Santos started the engine, the noise doubled.
“Here we go,” dos Santos shouted.
She backed the Sunmersible away from the spaceport and drove into the liquid green landscape that they could see through the slit-style windshield.
Elfrida sat limply in the front passenger seat. Icy air buffeted the back of her neck. The bags at her feet rustled, as the packaging of the snacks inside shrank back to normal after their brief trip through vacuum.
“This is a clever little truck,” dos Santos said. “It uses cryogenically stored hydrogen as a heat-sink to cool the interior and the critical systems. Then the hydrogen is expanded through a turbine which provides vehicle power. But we’re running on thermal power right now. We want to conserve every molecule of hydrogen.”
“So that rig on the roof is a solar array?”
“It’s also a parasol. There are ceramic and plastic insulation layers underneath the photovoltaic mesh. It’s deflecting …” Dos Santos glanced at the dash console. “80% of the heat that would otherwise be reaching the vehicle.”
“How far to the terminator?”
“I’m working that out right now.” Dos Santos tapped the radar plot. “It depends which way we go. The terminator moves at 3.6 kph. That’s 87 kilometers per sol, or Earth day. Sun’s been up for about ten sols at this location. So, heading due west, we have roughly 900 kilometers to cover … a bit more, since the terminator is moving away from us all the time.”
“It was only 500 kilometers getting here! Shouldn’t we just head back to the north pole?”
Dos Santos raised an eyebrow. “You really think that’s a good idea?”
Elfrida fiddled with a lock of hair. Questions nagged, urgent but ill-defined. She settled for the simplest one. “Have we got comms?”
“Off-planet? Nope. It looks like all the sats are down.”
“That’s crazy. What about the private sector? They can’t all have lost their satellites. And what about Star Force, for God’s sake? Where’s the Crash Test Dummy?”
Dos Santos’s lips stretched humorlessly. “Remember, there were a couple of GTVs parked in the crater?”
“Yes, of course. But they were gone. The Marines escaped in them.”
“Pretty to think so,” dos Santos said.
xxxvii.
1,200 kilometers to the west, it was still night.
Scattered embers dotted the twilight zone. Seen from space, they would have looked like cozy campfires.
Closer to, each one was a maelstrom of chemical flames raging in the vacuum.
The most northerly of these conflagrations was—or rather, had been—the surface mining operation of Danggood Universal, Inc.
The all-terrain mobile white goods fab had not yet been hit. But regional CO Kip Rensselaer knew it was just a matter of time.
He forced his staff into their EVA suits. Seven-year-old Miranda, the geologist’s daughter, wept. “I want to take the fish! Please, please, Mommy! Can we take the fish?” They were the only living creatures Miranda had known, apart from these six adults, in her short life.
“No, darling. We can’t take the fish,” geologist Isabel started to explain. Rensselaer cut her off with the CEO bark that he rarely resorted to.
“Get into your doggone suit, now!”
They egressed from the hab module that perched like a beanie atop the fab. Half-climbing, half-falling, they hustled down the ladder that spiraled around the fab’s exterior. Inside this colossal drum, industrial printers churned out consumer durables ranging from wind turbine blades to bicycles. They were still at it. They did not know that the factory had been hit by a barrage of missiles launched from orbit by—Rensselaer’s best guess—the PLAN.
The PLAN never ventured this far into the inner system.
So everyone thought.
But then again, the PLAN had destroyed that Venus co-orbital, Galicia? Gasblower? Galapagos? a couple of years back.
Anyway, there was a first time for everything.
A cargo container the size of a house slid out of the shipping hatch. Reflective insulating foil wrapped it. The silver surface reflected the flames from the blaze behind them. The container rolled onto the cargo launcher that travelled behind the fab like a lollipop-shaped trailer. Rensselaer chivvied his terrified staff down onto the articulated ‘stick’ of the lollipop.
The adults were dragging the ergoform sofas from the living-room, several quilt covers full of spare oxygen and water tanks, and twang cords—the bungee cords of the space age.
Lots of twang cords.
Handler bots clambered up over the edges of the cargo launcher. They surrounded the container and guided it out to the circular end of the lollipop. This was the slingatron.
Rensselaer sent a command via his EEG signalling crystals: ~SYSTEM COMMAND: Pause launch countdown!
The handler bots froze. The little group clambered over the snail-spiral ridges of the ‘lollipop,’ the slingatron’s housing. The cargo container was now settled in the launch cradle at the center of the slingatron. They splarted the sofas on top of it. They then lashed themselves onto the sofas, running their twang cords all the way around the container.
Rensselaer helped Isabel to secure Miranda on her sofa, wedged between lumpy quilt covers full of supplies. A liberal application of splart would stop the quilts from falling off.
“Is there enough clearance?” Isabel said over the suit-to-suit radio.
“Yes. That, I’m not worried about.”
Rensselaer glanced up at the sky. He had come to love this black vault. You could see the whole universe from the nightside of Mercury.
Right now, all he was looking for was toilet rolls—as people called the PLAN’s lethal little fighters.
But he wouldn’t see them coming with his naked eyes, and even if he did, what could they do about it? Their only chance was to get away before the attackers returned.
He spared a thought for his old friend Ulysses Seth, who’d died in the futile rebellion he himself had helped to spark. Dr. Seth had used to say that the PLAN was slowly killing the human spirit. But maybe he’d been wrong. Rensselaer had never felt more human than he did right now. Thoughts of profit margins, depreciation costs, market share, and suchlike had vaporized, burnt up by his laser-like focus on keeping this handful of people alive.
“Now I know,” Isabel said, “what it means to be desperate.”
“Yes,” Rensselaer admitted. “Strapping oneself on a cargo container that is about to be fired into space from a large slingshot? I think that qualifies as desperate.”
“When we get into orbit, allow me to punch you for thinking of this.”
When, not if. He loved her for that.
~SYSTEM COMMAND: Restart launch countdown.
The container, with six adults and one child lashed to its surface, slid into the launch tube.
The slingatron was a simple machine. It consisted of a tube coiled into a spiral. The launch cradle was in its start position right now, at the center of the spiral. At Rensselaer’s command, the whole apparatus tilted up to an angle, taking them with it, like a carnival ride he remembered from his childhood. How we screamed … Slowly at first, then faster, the slingatron began to gyrate. Centrifugal force pulled the container into the spiral.
He’d gamed it out, tested and retested his calculations during the hours following the news from UNVRP HQ, when it was a CEO’s job to stay calm and plan for the worst. Payloads launched from the slingatron experienced a maximum acceleration of 43 gees, necessary to achieve Mercury’s 4.25 km/s escape velocity. That was well outside manned spaceflight parameters. But the human body could withstand g-forces of up to 200 gees. Pilots, and involuntary test subjects involved in accidents, had proved it as far back as the 20th century. 43 gees was survivable. For a few seconds …
The weight of the universe pushed down on his chest. He tried to reach out to Miranda, to make sure she wasn’t too scared. His hand would not move. His thoughts felt equally heavy, crawling like broken things.
12 seconds to achieve maximum velocity …
I saw the ship that hit us …
I saw it.
Not them. IT.
On the heels of this shattering thought, Kip Rensselaer blacked out.
The cargo container rocketed out of the slingatron’s launch tube. Its brutal acceleration bore down on the human beings strapped to its surface. But this artificial-gravity effect diminished the higher it got.
Kip Rensselaer and his staff floated into orbit atop an Earth-bound shipment of 15,000 air-conditioners.
Seconds later, the container’s foil covering unfolded into a solar sail 100 meters wide. (Rensselaer had taken care that their twang cords would not interfere with the sail’s deployment.) Emerging from Mercury’s shadow, the sail caught the light of the sun—and sheltered the humans behin
d it, who were starting to stir and groan in agony.
Rensselaer’s first concern was for Miranda. When the little girl had finally responded to her suit’s injections of adrenaline and methylphenidate, he sat back on his heels and regarded the universe.
He remembered his last thought before blacking out.
“I saw it,” he told the others.
“What?”
“The ship that attacked us. I saw it, before we lost our comms. Computed its trajectory ... It wasn’t the PLAN. It was the ship that should have been protecting us from the PLAN. It was the UNSF Crash Test Dummy.”
xxxviii.
“How are we coping with the heat?” Elfrida said, breaking the silence in the Sunmersible.
Dos Santos laughed. “Titanium treads, baby. You could barbecue a steak on those rocks, but our trusty pal doesn’t give a crap.”
“I wish our trusty pal went a bit faster.”
“You poor kid. You’re all in.” Dos Santos glanced over at Elfrida. “Get some sleep.”
“I guess I will.” Elfrida snuggled down in the passenger seat, nuzzling the backrest until a dent formed to support her head.
She closed her eyes. But she did not go to sleep.
She dived back into Dr. Hasselblatter’s sim.
In the sim, the dayside of Mercury was a quartz wonderland. The designers had toned down the sunlight to the equivalent of a bright day in the Himalayas. Elfrida located herself accurately within the sim, as she had in the rover, by syncing the Sunmersible’s radar data with the satellite map that the sim was built on. Then she watched the scenery bump past.
3D graffiti tags, installations of funhouse mirrors, pools of lead that would liquefy at noon, obelisks, cairns, stupas, even a copy of the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer …
VOTE FOR HASSELBLATTER, she remembered. MOAR ART.
She ranged into the distance, zooming in on any feature that interested her. On a ridge about ten kilometers away, she spied a row of squat objects. She flew her viewpoint over them … and got such a shock it nearly threw her out of the sim.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 88