Someone laughed, and stifled it.
“Very funny,” Lorna said flintily. “Obviously, we need to add value to our proposition. I was coming to that. You’re authorized to offer this selection of free gifts to each targeted voter, provided they send us a vid grab or screenshot of their vote for Angelica Lin.”
The screens displayed the selection of free gifts:
A premium internet avatar
A year’s supply of nutriblocks
A weekend getaway on Luna, including a tour of One Pig Base and a complimentary hamper of pork products
A fifteen-minute live consultation with Frank Hope III to supercharge your personal and financial trajectory (latency time not included)
A home immersion kit worth S3,000
“Something there for every income level, as you see,” Lorna said. “And they’ll also be entered into the bonus raffle for …”
A full scholarship to Eton’s exclusive Luna campus for one (1) child between the ages of 6 and 16
“Oh, wow. Can we vote, sir?”
Lorna chuckled. “Isn’t S10,000 for a single day’s work enough for you?”
“Ha, ha; yes, of course, sir.”
“But isn’t this illegal, sir? I mean, uh …”
“No,” Lorna said. His blue eyes were as cool as winter skies. “Not whatsoever.”
The man who had spoken was one of the construction industry analysts, a fat little Earthborn guy wearing a t-shirt with embedded vid of a toddler’s birthday party. “Thanks for clarifying that, sir,” he mumbled.
Lorna left the room. They grabbed plates of food from the buffet. Conversation was subdued. Mendoza sat next to the man with the birthday-party t-shirt. “Nice to meet you,” he said.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Emil.” The guy slid a scared glance at Mendoza’s cast.
“Is that your daughter? She’s adorable,” Mendoza said.
“Thanks.”
The others were talking about the mechanics of the job ahead of them. Mendoza heard someone say “Let’s ask the psephology guy.”
This was very obviously the B team. They’d never get it done without his help.
Mendoza buttered a bran muffin. “I’m just here in an advisory role,” he told Emil. “But if I’m going to be any real help to you guys, I’ll need a screen.” He gestured at the fold-up sticking out of Emil’s back pocket. “Mind if I borrow yours?”
★
As soon as Mendoza got himself logged on under Emil’s name, he ran a search. “ALL DATABASES: DR. ABDULLAH HASSELBLATTER.”
The first result—and the second, and the third, and the three hundredth result—was a viral vid of Dr. Hasselblatter having sex with a maidbot.
“Oh boy,” Mendoza murmured. He ate the other half of his muffin and skimmed the commentary. The consensus was that the vid was real, not a fake.
Links led to another vid. This one was a press conference where Dr. Hasselblatter had tried to explain away the first vid. It ended with a scuffle between Dr. Hasselblatter’s burka-clad wife and the UN peacekeepers providing security at the event.
Helpful anti-censorship activists explained that the vid had originally ended with NSFW footage of Mrs. Hasselblatter’s burka being torn off. She had turned out not to be a Muslim at all—nor even human. ‘She’ had been a sex-bot.
“Yuck,” Mendoza muttered, remembering the hints he’d picked up that there was something off about Dr. Hasselblatter’s personal life.
I don’t want to go there, Lorna had said, but after their sabotage campaign backfired, he must have decided he had no choice.
It had worked, anyway. The leaked vid had torpedoed Dr. Hasselblatter’s bid for the UNVRP directorship. The press conference had ended his career.
Mendoza went back over the press conference vid, frame by frame. In one crowd shot, he found what he was looking for: a glimpse of Elfrida. She was standing on a desk, gnawing her knuckles as she watched her boss’s career implode. It must have been a horrible shock for her. Mendoza knew she’d respected Dr. Hasselblatter, as much as she groused about his ambition.
So, sixteen hours ago she’d been alive and well.
But that had been before the riots.
Logged in as Emil, Mendoza did not dare search for Elfrida’s name. Instead, he compared the latest news reports on the riots. The death toll was still rising, but names had begun to be put to the dead, and Elfrida’s was not among them.
She’s alive.
She has to be alive.
But the situation on Mercury was still in flux. Amateur vid feeds showed Star Force Marines stalking the halls of UNVRP HQ, children weeping as their parents were dragged away. That was the kind of thing that short-circuited Elfrida’s brain, as Mendoza knew all too well. She’d stop at nothing to help the survivors, even if it put her in danger.
Would the situation calm down if Angelica Lin won the election? If Derek Lorna got what he wanted?
Mendoza knuckled his eyes. The travel agent interrupted his thoughts with a cough. “Um, we were just wondering about these MI story-writing resources we’ve been given. If you could show us how they work?”
Mendoza forced a smile. “Sure. I’ll walk you through it.”
★
Nine hours later, the torrent of data flowing across their screens dwindled to a trickle and stopped. Mendoza looked at the other members of the team. “We did it.”
They exchanged weary grins. They had successfully bribed 143,012 people to cast their votes for Angelica Lin.
“It’s not over yet,” said Emil. “There’s two hours to go before voting closes.”
“It’s mathematically over,” Mendoza said. “Check your news feeds. They’re already reporting Lin’s victory.”
Derek Lorna had got what he wanted … at the cost of committing a crime that would put them all in jail for the rest of their lives, if they got caught. Not to mention the cost of all those bribes. It must have run into the tens of millions.
Well, that wasn’t Mendoza’s problem.
They wandered around the chapel, stretched their stiff muscles, and snacked on the remains of the lunch buffet that had replaced the breakfast buffet. Outside the windows, spacecraft continued to land and take off. It was getting on for 22:00, Luna time, but Mendoza did not feel remotely tired. His back hurt a bit. He crunched another of the painkillers the medibot had given him after his operation.
While the others discussed what they were going to do with the money, Mendoza peeked at Emil’s screen again.
He’d been poking around in the spaceport’s data management utilities. He had access, because the team had needed to use the spaceport’s computing resources to hide the origin of all those individually tailored polls. He had searched the launch schedule for ships likely to be the one carrying Fr. Lynch. He’d identified a handful of possibles. And he’d moved their launch slots back.
22:06.
The Gold Digger, a Juggernaut bound for Ceres, blasted off.
Hope that wasn’t it.
He did not know if he would get a chance to contact any of the ships. But maybe, now that Derek Lorna had got what he wanted, he’d let Mendoza go.
The door of the chapel opened. Lorna entered with a light step. “Congratulations! You did it, guys! You’ve earned a place in history. Not the official version, of course.”
Puzzled smiles greeted this announcement.
“Five years from now, or maybe ten years, humanity will thank you. Unfortunately, you won’t be around to see it. Because the future of humanity does not belong to plebs like you. It belongs to highly advanced phavatars.” Lorna grinned. “Like me.”
The top of his head hinged back. A stubby little gun threw a targeting laser across the chapel. The beam fastened on Seanette, the woman from Harrods customer service. It brightened to a linear lightning bolt. Seanette went rigid and collapsed, her limbs jittering on the floor.
After a second of stunned disbelief, everyone screamed and scattered to the ends of the chapel. Mendo
za dived under the pews. He recalled how he’d evaded Lorna’s hijacked bot in the clinic at Farm Eighty-One. His chances were poorer now. He’d been buzzing on morale juice at that time. Also, he hadn’t been in a minimal-flexion cast following surgery.
Also, Dr. Miller’s assistant hadn’t had an electrolaser in its head.
He crawled past Emil’s body. Emil’s hair was burning, while the children on his t-shirt silently sang Happy Birthday once again.
Ganfeng from the Shackleton City Visitor Center leapt over Mendoza, kicking him in the cast. It hurt so much Mendoza almost blacked out. When his vision cleared, he saw Ganfeng lying face-down. Electrolaser weapons delivered a precisely calibrated current via an ionized plasma beam. Basically, they electrocuted you.
“Mendoza.”
He sat up. Stared at Lorna, who was a couple of meters away, standing in front of the little waterfall at the end of the chapel.
But of course, it wasn’t Lorna. It was a phavatar, a robotic telepresence platform. The type known as a “selfie”—a phavatar that had been customized to resemble its owner in every detail.
Except for the gun sticking out of the top of its head.
“Saved you for last,” the phavatar said. “I thought you’d like to know a bit more about the future you won’t, unfortunately, see.”
“Don’t you know what happens to bad guys who stop to gloat before killing their victims?”
“Oh, come on. I’m not a bad guy. I’m just well-informed. If paying attention to what’s going on makes you a bad guy …” The phavatar shrugged. “Stick horns on me and call me Lucifer, I guess. But someone’s got to do this, and I volunteered to be the one who breaks the eggs.”
“Was any of it true? The stuff you told me about fighting back against the PLAN?”
“Absolutely. Every last word. You could have been part of it, too, if you hadn’t screwed up.”
Mendoza snuck a glance around the room. Bodies lay motionless. He smelled burning fabric and hair. Why wasn’t anyone coming to help? Answer: Lorna had made sure they wouldn’t. He probably had friends in the Spaceport Authority. People who thought the same way he did.
Mendoza felt a pang of profound regret. “I wanted to join your fight. But …”
“Too bad. Because of you, a hundred and seventeen people died. Whoops. Update,” the phavatar said, glancing at the corpses on the floor. “A hundred and twenty-three.”
“You didn’t let me finish,” Mendoza said. “I wanted to be part of the fight against the PLAN. But not if it’s being led by a psychopath.”
“Any other insults? Questions? Or is that all you got?”
“How did you arrange that riot at UNVRP HQ?”
“I didn’t. The plebs working for UNVRP did that all by themselves. It seems that when Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign imploded, they got mad that there wasn’t going to be a new golden age of tourism, after all. No quidditch, no robot bison … It’s dangerous, you know, Mendoza, to offer people a fantasy based on OPM, and then snatch it away.”
“OPM?”
“Other people’s money. My idea was to evacuate everyone from Mercury, leaving just a skeleton crew to run the shipyards and factories. People cost a fortune. But Doug doesn’t see it that way. So, OK, he can keep his rat-infested underground habs.” The phavatar shrugged.
“And Angelica Lin? What about her?”
“Angie? She’s dispensable, and will be dispensed with pretty soon.”
The casual disavowal took Mendoza’s breath away. “Wait. Pretty soon? You mean this isn’t over yet?”
“It’s only just beginning. Angie doesn’t know that, of course.”
The phavatar extended its hand. On its palm, a robotic nightmare appeared. It had six legs, drill-bit fangs, and big, cute eyes. It was about twenty centimeters tall.
“This is a vinge-class industrial phavatar. In real life, they’re bigger. There are hundreds of them on Mercury, and they are moving towards UNVRP HQ as we speak. When they get there, Angie will let them in. She thinks they’re there to neutralize the Marines, so she can declare independence. She’s right. But it won’t end there. As it happens, these phavatars are now a distributed mobility platform for a little program I put together.”
“Which is supposed to do what?”
“Finish the job,” the phavatar said laconically. “I hate freeloaders.”
Mendoza thought, Elfrida. He said, “You’re going to kill everyone.”
“Except Doug’s people.”
“You can’t. That’s evil. It’s criminal.”
“It didn’t have to happen! We could have won the easy way. No laws broken. No one would have had to die, except for a few UNVRP suits.” The phavatar closed its fist, vanishing the projection of the vinge-class horror. “But you fucked up. Any last words?”
“I want a priest.”
“Sorry, no can do.”
Mendoza began to pray out loud. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit …”
Lorna’s phavatar tapped a toe impatiently.
The waterfall suddenly gushed out at maximum flow. In Luna’s low gravity, the stream of water travelled parallel to the floor. It hit the phavatar in the head.
The phavatar spun around. The water filled its skull cavity and rebounded as far as the ceiling.
Mendoza sprinted for the door.
Behind him, he heard the crack of something—he hoped it was something vital—shorting out.
“Mendozaaaa!” The phavatar’s voice chased him down the corridor.
He ran on, clumsy in his cast. He had no idea where he was. Spaceport staff shrank against the walls. Some of the quicker-witted ones started to run. Mendoza followed a man who seemed to know where he was going.
“Mendozaaa!” The phavatar’s roar mingled with shrieks from the staff.
The man Mendoza was following leapt into an elevator. Mendoza scrabbled at the closing doors. They opened again. He fell in. The man shouted, “Door close! What in the freak? Are we under attack? Is it the PLAN?”
“No,” Mendoza panted. “Call security. There are five dead people back there. In the chapel.”
A BOOM! cut him off. The elevator bounced, and then continued to descend.
The tannoy came alive. “Attention all passengers. This is a courtesy announcement. An … equipment malfunction … has occurred on the fifth floor of Terminal B. Security protocols have been activated, and there is no risk whatsoever. This has been a courtesy announcement.” It continued after a minimal pause, “All personnel on the fifth floor of Terminal B, please evacuate immediately. There is a significant risk of fire. Area shutdown will be implemented in thirty seconds. Repeat, evacuate immediately.”
“He must have self-destructed,” Mendoza muttered.
“Jeez! This is crazy! We were just there!”
The elevator halted on the ground floor. Mendoza left his companion with the words, “Thanks for opening the doors. You probably saved my life.”
He was in a limited-access corridor. He could hear the murmur of a troubled mass of people. He hurried through a one-way wicket, past the toilets, and out into an area which he remembered from his trip to 4 Vesta last year: the Outer System Departures concourse. People milled, nervous. They had probably heard the explosion, and were not reassured by the courtesy announcement. Mendoza repeatedly caught the dread syllable “PLAN.” Like the man in the elevator, everyone jumped to the same conclusion.
He’d come this way when he shipped out for 4 Vesta last year, and he remembered the layout. He walked through the crowd, matching his gait to the meanderings of the bewildered passengers. An iridescent half-shell sheltered an airlock signposted PLAY AREA. The access light was green. Mendoza went in, flipped open a locker full of small sharesuits covered in Unicorn Tears® and Knights of the Milky Way™ characters, and took one of the larger ones stenciled PARENT / GUARDIAN. Assured by the airlock that his seals were “tickety-boo!” he went out into a hailstorm of brightly colored foam balls.
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Lethal radiation didn’t hang around in the vacuum, so for twenty-minute windows between launches, it was safe to go out.
Spacesuited children pelted each other with foam balls, slid down curly slides, and bounced on a trampoline that catapulted them ten meters up inside a transparent tube.
Mendoza skulked around the playground, seeking the emergency exit. There had to be one. Children’s safety was such a priority in Shackleton City, they’d never build a play area with only one entrance …
When he found the emergency exit, he pushed it open and exited into the launch zone.
A siren filled his helmet, ear-splitting. He broke into a run. Terminal B loomed behind him, a minimalist plastisteel edifice spangled with squares of brightness. The entire fifth floor was dark.
Waaah-wooonh! Waaah-wooonh! His sharesuit unleashed a klaxon in his ears, followed by an automated warning. “Return to the terminal immediately. Do not enter the launch zone. Return to the terminal immediately …”
Trying to tune out the noise, Mendoza glanced at the sharesuit’s HUD. Unbelievably, only fifteen minutes had passed since Lorna started his killing spree.
22:17.
That meant five of Mendoza’s possibles were still here: the Mafficker, the What Are You Looking At?, the Attachment Unavailable, the Katana, and the Bit O’ Jam.
Waaah-wooonh! Waaah-wooonh!
This noise was driving him crazy.
Spaceships towered ahead of him. Some looked like four-storey buildings wearing Elizabethan ruffs, and others were ground-hugging disks or toroids. The floor of Amundsen Crater was 105 kilometers across. Spaceplanes and other wheeled spacecraft landed on the runway on the far side of the central massif. The ships on this side were landing craft capable of vertical launches and landings, mostly Flyingsaucers and Superlifters belonging to long-haul motherships that remained in orbit.
One of Mendoza’s possibles, the Mafficker, was a spaceplane parked on the far side of the crater, so he discarded that one. Even if it was the one, he’d never get there. That left the What Are You Looking At? the Attachment Unavailable, the Katana, and the Bit O’ Jam.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 104