“Who are you, anyway? I mean, all I need to know is that Father Tom vouches for you, but I’m curious.”
Mendoza laughed. “You’re kidding! You don’t remember? We’ve met before. My name’s John Mendoza. I was on the Vesta Express.”
Kiyoshi looked abashed. He smoothed his moustache. “Too many cosmic rays to the brain,” he apologized. “Of course! The guy who, ah …”
“Hid in the kitchen,” Mendoza said flatly.
“I don’t remember that. But I was kind of busy at the time, dealing with the Heidegger program. Hell yeah, I remember that.” Kiyoshi fell silent for a moment. “Was kind of a turning point for me.”
“Me, too.”
Kiyoshi looked him up and down, reassessing him, Mendoza thought. “So how’d you end up here?”
“Just bad luck, I guess.”
“I’d say it was good luck that you met Father Tom. He’s probably the only person on Luna who could have helped you. That’s one hell of a coincidence.”
“Not really,” Fr. Lynch said. “There are few enough believers on Luna, and only a handful of priests.”
Mendoza shook his head. Guilt rose in his throat like bile. “There’s something I never told you, Father.”
“What?”
“I never planned to deceive you, but—”
“Just spit it out!”
“I got your name from him.” He nodded at Kiyoshi. “After 4 Vesta, he bailed in a hurry. Understandable. But he gave me a note for—for my friend.” Elfrida. Fear for her seethed out of the cracks in his thoughts. “She, uh, kind of threw it away. It was on the floor, so I picked it up. It said, Fr. Thomas Lynch, S.J.—if you were wondering. Well, I was wondering. I was wondering about a lot of things. So when I got home, I googled you, Father. And that’s how I ended up in your dojo.”
“Oh, you’re still doing kendo, huh, Father?” Kiyoshi said. “It always cracks me up to see them in their hakama, going Hai! Onegai shimasu! When nobody actually speaks Japanese in the solar system anymore. Well, I guess it’s good exercise.” He shook his head. “That note wasn’t from me. It was from Jun.”
Fr. Lynch produced a pained smile. “I never knew that, but I’m glad we found each other, Mendoza. The Lord has a way of bringing us together with the right people at the right time.”
Mendoza smiled in gratitude for this absolution. But something else was bothering him. “Yonezawa, your brother … he’s kind of quiet. Is he OK?”
He undid his straps. Craned towards the far end of the bridge. He couldn’t see into the dark corner where Jun Yonezawa had to be sitting. Or maybe lying unconscious. Or …
He felt a hard chill of unknowing-ness, as if Jun Yonezawa’s silence were a physical object pushing up against him.
Kiyoshi took off his shirt. He kicked off his shoes, too. “It’s getting kind of hot.” He reached down and stowed his box of pastries in a mini-fridge beside his couch. “Don’t want them to spoil.”
It was hot. Mendoza hadn’t been going to say anything about it. For all he knew, maybe the normal temperature on the bridge of a Superlifter was approximately 40° C.
“Anyone want supplementary oxygen?” Kiyoshi said.
Mendoza and Fr. Lynch both accepted the offer. They sat in the dark, breathing into their masks. Sweat globules detached from Mendoza’s lower face, floated around the inside of his mask, and went up his nose.
Suddenly Fr. Lynch removed his mask and burst out, “Can you not switch the bloody thing off? It’s killing him!”
“I told you,” Kiyoshi said. Half-naked, he was a pale, motionless streak in the sweltering darkness. “It’s not fucking real!”
“Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?” Mendoza shouted.
“Use your damn BCI,” Kiyoshi said.
“I don’t have a damn BCI!”
“He had it removed,” Fr. Lynch said.
“Then get some interface contacts, like Father uses.” Kiyoshi lurched forward, clawing at his screens. ”We’re far enough away. I’m going to turn it off.”
“Do you really want to see?” Fr. Lynch said to Mendoza. “I’ve a spare pair of contacts.”
“Yes, yes.”
Fr. Lynch leaned over and passed him a clamshell case emblazoned with the logo of the children’s entertainment franchise Knights of the Milky Way™. “It’s all they sell these days,” the Jesuit said apologetically.
Mendoza fumbled the contacts into his eyes. It had been ages since he used this primitive technology. His eyes watered.
Skinned with a virtual overlay, the forward bulkhead now bristled with command levers, which projected inward towards the pilot’s couch like the spines of an iron maiden.
Mendoza turned to look at the astrogator’s couch.
A man lay there, motionless.
Mendoza swore aloud.
The man was sick. Gray sores pitted every square centimeter of visible flesh. His jeans and t-shirt had fallen in over his bones. One eyelid had been eaten away, revealing a dull white eyeball. He looked like he was being devoured by some necrotizing bacteria.
“Susmaryosep! He’s dying!”
The lights came on. A blast of cold air hit Mendoza’s neck. The bowels of the Superlifter emitted a perky rattle.
The man in the astrogator’s couch sat up. “Deleting repo now,” he said in the voice of Kiyoshi’s brother. Smooth flesh flowed into his sores. His limbs filled out. Within milliseconds, he had returned to full health. He appeared to be a small-framed Japanese guy in his mid-twenties. “Hey, Mendoza,” he said, meeting Mendoza’s stunned gaze. “Guess Kiyoshi approved you for network access.”
“Why not? He’s on the run, too,” Kiyoshi said. “Heads up, Jun, we’re right on top of you.”
Mendoza’s screens had come alive again. Being no expert in spaceship telematics, he focused on the optical feed. That white marble was the sun. A dot floated across it.
Without warning, the Superlifter fired its maneuvering thrusters and flipped 180 degrees. Mendoza, who had undone his straps, floated out of his couch and crashed headfirst into the ceiling.
“And that’s why we strap in during maneuvers,” Kiyoshi said, yanking on his virtual joysticks.
Mendoza decided to just stay where he was. The former floor was now the ceiling. Fr. Lynch and Kiyoshi were hanging upside-down above his head.
“Reversing thrust in a Superlifter is no fun,” Jun sympathized, peering down from his couch.
“But you’re not really there, are you? You’re not real!”
“Define real,” Jun said. “Define there. I couldn’t talk to you while the Ghost was operational because, y’know, stealth. But I am real. And I was there. I’m there now; and here.”
“Who, no, what are you?”
“Burn completed,” Kiyoshi interrupted. “Reducing torque. Synchronizing rotation speed.”
“Looks OK,” Jun said.
“Docking in eighteen … seventeen …”
The thrust gravity faded. They were weightless again. On the optical feed, a forest of lobate radiator fins loomed. A steely bulge rotated into view.
“That’s one big chunk of spaceship,” Mendoza said.
“That’s the Chimera,” Kiyoshi said. “I hope you’re not allergic to mold.”
xii.
Kiyoshi docked the Superlifter in the auxiliary craft bay of the Chimera, formerly the Unicorn, formerly the St. Francis. He guided his unwanted passengers to the operations module. Father Tom and John Mendoza were both novice spacewalkers, so he made sure they held on all the way. He pointed them in the direction of the crew quarters—which were rarely used, but still had air—and floated up to the bridge, carrying a stack of greasy cardboard boxes.
The boxes contained choux à la crème from Moon Cakes, the famous Shackleton City patisserie. They were subject to a 110% export tariff (which Kiyoshi had not paid) on account of containing real sugar.
The refrigerator stood in the corner next to the toilet. It had a sheet of heavy p
aper taped over its screen. Kiyoshi started to pack the boxes of pastries into the fridge.
The bridge was a cavernous, semi-circular room with a door at either end. Doors, not valves or pressure seals. That’s how old this ship was.
The smaller door, from the data center, opened, and Jun floated in, upside-down to Kiyoshi. The door had opened at the hub’s command; Jun was a projection displayed on Kiyoshi’s retinal implants. The repo on the Superlifter had worn jeans, but Jun now sported his preferred garb—a black monk’s habit. Deft use of the tannoy speakers made his voice sound like it was coming from the projection. “It was me,” he said.
“What was?”
“While you were running the pre-launch checks, Father Tom asked me to check on his friend. I searched the spaceport, and found a room where all the surveillance cameras had been disabled. It was the chapel. That seemed unusual, so …”
“The fountain,” Kiyoshi recalled. “Mendoza said something about a fountain going haywire.”
“I was only trying to draw attention to the malfunctioning cameras.” Jun landed on the far wall and rebounded, right way up. Not that there was any right way up in zero-gee, but the bridge had a floor and a ceiling, both panelled in real wood. This ship had been built long before innovations such as gyrospheres and rotating command modules. It smelt of dust and mold. “God made it count, I guess.”
Kiyoshi sighed. “We really don’t need another passenger. Well, I guess we can drop him off on 6 Hebe.”
“We can’t take him home, that’s for sure. The boss-man wouldn’t like it.”
This was something of a dare. Kiyoshi ignored it, returned to his task. The refrigerator said in its cold, artificial voice, “You’re going to have to take something out.”
“No, I’m not,” Kiyoshi snarled.
Jun floated down to the astrogator’s couch and noodled on the navigation console. It looked like he was typing and gesturing at the screens, like a normal human being. In reality, he needed no interface to communicate with the ship. He was the ship.
Kiyoshi had made Jun out of archived data and off-the-shelf MI components, years ago, after the real Jun died. He’d planned to buy him a physical avatar, a custom job, something really high-end, but he’d never managed to scrape the money together, and now it was too late. Jun had grown like a baby from the marriage of egg and seed. He ran on the ship’s hub, plus a roomful of bolt-on processor stacks that Kiyoshi had bought for him and installed in the data center. Kiyoshi could feel the heat of the computers coming through the walls.
“Try taking out the instant ramen,” the refrigerator advised. ”You don’t need to keep that in the fridge.”
“You did too much shopping,” Jun remarked, mildly.
“Next stop, 6 Hebe; that’s a month’s voyage, even if we burn all the way. And some of us need to eat.”
Kiyoshi was actually a bit worried about the food situation. He’d done a lot of shopping, but not enough for three. They would be splitting their last packets of instant ramen by the time they reached 6 Hebe, an entrepot asteroid in the outer Belt, 450 million kilometers from Earth. That wouldn’t be the end of their long journey, but it would be a chance to stock up on comestibles.
The main door of the bridge opened, and John Mendoza floated in.
“You know anything about farming?” Kiyoshi asked him. “I’ve got a farm-in-a-bottle. Enough cubic meterage to feed fifty, but I let it dry out. I don’t need it when it’s just me. But we could bring some of the hydroponic tanks over from the cargo module, rehydrate the growing medium. I’m sure I’ve got some seed potatoes somewhere.”
“Where are we?” Mendoza said.
Jun answered, “Orbiting the L4 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. It’s a fuel depot and transfer point for outer-system voyages. You can hang out here for a long time without getting noticed.”
“What he means,” Kiyoshi said, “is that the long arm of the law isn’t really very long. Enforcement drops off exponentially as soon as you get out of the Earth-Luna corridor. We’re getting ready to burn now. We’ll shadow an ITR hauler for the first leg to mask our emissions. Soon as we’re underway, we’ll be completely safe.”
Mendoza floated across the bridge. “Wow,” he said, spotting the logo on Kiyoshi’s boxes of pastries. “Moon Cakes? High-end.”
“I used to do drugs,” Kiyoshi said. “Now I do pastries.”
“Ha, ha.”
Kiyoshi fitted the last box into the fridge. “Victory! Now tell me how I’ll have to take something out, you satanic machine.”
“He bought a sushi machine on Luna,” Jun said to Mendoza. “I can’t wait until that starts defying him, too. There’s nothing as entertaining as a grown man arguing with kitchen appliances.”
“I haven’t even set the sushi machine up yet,” Kiyoshi said. “I’m afraid the fridge might tempt it to the dark side.”
They were bantering for Mendoza’s benefit, testing his curiosity, seeing what he’d respond to.
He said, “Where are we going?”
OK.
“6 Hebe,” Kiyoshi said. “Heard of it?”
“No.”
“It’s an asteroid. When we get there, you’ll be able to pick up transport back to Earth.”
“No,” Mendoza said. “I’m not going to 6 Hebe, or wherever you people come from. I’m going to Mercury.”
Kiyoshi folded his arms. “Yeah? How? Because, just so we’re clear, the Chimera is not your space taxi.”
In the corner of his eye he saw Jun drifting out of his couch, gliding closer, preparing to defuse the confrontation.
Mendoza did not react to Jun. That was useful information. Jun had him spooked. “Someone I care about is stuck on Mercury.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She’s in danger.”
“Three years ago,” Kiyoshi said, “everyone I cared about was in danger. The PLAN was targeting our home asteroid, and Star Force wasn’t interested. We were asteroid squatters. Purebloods. Who cares about people like that? No one. I was in the Belt at the time. Too far away to get back.” He kept his voice steady with a conscious effort. “So, they died. I lost the only home I’d ever had. But that’s life. You take the pain and make something of it.”
“11073 Galapagos, right?” Mendoza said, “I heard that nearly everyone was rescued.”
“Um, well, pretty much,” Kiyoshi admitted.
“And you know who rescued them? Who stole a Star Force fighter to come to your aid? It was Elfrida Goto. Now she’s stuck on Mercury. She needs your help. Are you going to let her down?”
Kiyoshi scowled, hiding his surprise. He remembered Elfrida Goto—not altogether fondly. She was one of those Space Corps do-gooders who caused trouble wherever they went. You could certainly make a case that Kiyoshi and Jun owed her for her actions three years ago. She’d been on 4 Vesta, too. But that didn’t mean Kiyoshi was going to blindly accept what Mendoza said. “What’s happening on Mercury, anyway?”
“I’ve just run a news search,” Jun said. “There’s all this stuff about a riot, but it sounds like Star Force has it under control now.”
Mendoza’s gaze flicked for a scared instant to Jun, and then back to Kiyoshi. “I’m not sure, but I think a bunch of rich guys are plotting to take over the planet.”
“That’s interesting,” Jun said. His tone was neutral. He added, for Kiyoshi’s ears alone, via Kiyoshi’s BCI and cochlear transducers: “This might be related to what we’ve been looking into.”
Kiyoshi subvocalized his reply. ~How likely is that? What does a riot on Mercury have to do with nanoprobes mapping the PLAN’s installations on Mars?
“They’re both secret.”
~Everything’s secret in this solar system. People hoard information. Individuals, corporations, scientific research institutes, they’re all at it. Including us.
When you subvocalized, your lips twitched. It was noticeable, and Mendoza noticed it. He said, “You know, it’s rude to have private conversations
in front of people.”
“Why don’t you go back to your cabin and get some rest?” Kiyoshi said. “You’ve been through a lot. We can talk later.”
That was as nice as he could be to this guy who’d begged refuge on his ship, nearly got them all killed, put him in a position where he had no choice but to deploy the Ghost, and had now made him feel guilty about Elfrida Goto, on top of everything.
He floated over to the pilot’s seat. It was not a couch, but a grubby nest of freeze-blankets—the poor man’s substitute for air-conditioners. He kicked the blankets away. He had the heat exchangers working flat out to keep the passengers comfortable, so the temperature was a balmy 24°. He wedged his knees under his workstation, hooked his toes into the stirrups, and prepared to fire up the Chimera’s main drive. “Hey, Jun. Haven’t you finished calculating our delta-V requirements yet?”
“Sorry,” Jun said. “Got distracted.”
And that was bullshit, because Jun couldn’t get distracted. He had almost four exaflops of processing power. He could do more than one thing at once.
“Well, hurry up. That ITR hauler’s leaving in a few minutes. We want to time our burn to match theirs, just in case anyone’s watching.”
Kiyoshi found his cigarette amid the dispersing corona of blankets. He turned it on and inhaled a calming mixture of nicotine and THC vapor. He waited for Mendoza to go away.
“Run those calculations again,” Mendoza said, and there was an edge of rage in his voice.
The floating blankets obscured Kiyoshi’s view. He pushed the mess aside.
Mendoza floated overhead, gripping a laser pistol. A dirt-cheap weapon, molten salt battery. Wouldn’t hold more than a few ergs of charge.
But still.
A laser pistol.
On the bridge of Kiyoshi’s ship.
“We’re not going to 6 Hebe, or wherever you shady Belter types hang out. We’re going to Mercury!”
Mendoza was aiming his pistol, not at Kiyoshi, but at Jun.
Kiyoshi would have laughed out loud, if it hadn’t been so sad.
“Program that course. Now!”
Jun’s projection swivelled in his couch to face Mendoza. “This matters a lot to you, huh?”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 106