The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series

by Felix R. Savage

  “Elfrida saved my life. Maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but it sure does to me. I’m not leaving her to die!”

  The pistol trembled visibly, and Mendoza wobbled, too, as he tried to hold his position in mid-air without going into a spin. Kiyoshi slid his toes out of the stirrups. “Where’d you get that gun?” he asked.

  “It’s mine,” said Father Tom, from the door.

  “That’s right,” Mendoza said. “He taught me kendo, and he also taught me that no matter how good you are with a sword, you’ll lose every time to the guy with a gun.”

  “It also helps to know how to move in zero-gee,” Kiyoshi said. He pushed off, arrowed up at Mendoza, and seized the back of his shirt in one hand. His other hand closed over the top of the pistol.

  A flash burst from its business end.

  Mendoza tumbled in one direction, and Jun tumbled in the other, with a burning hole in his chest. Blood and flames gouted from the wound. Incandescent gobs of flesh stuck to the ceiling. More blood spattered the side of the fridge, where Jun came to rest in a crumpled ball, with flames licking over his body.

  Kiyoshi hit the aft wall, the pistol now safely clutched in his hand. He hooked one bare foot through a grab handle, staring open-mouthed. This was quite the show.

  “Look what you did!” he shouted, belatedly.

  Father Tom reached Mendoza, yelled at him. Mendoza shook his head. “Lasers don’t do that,” he mumbled. “Not possible. Not real.”

  Jun sat up. He picked gobbets of flaming blood off his face and dropped them on the floor, where they went out.

  “You’re right, of course,” Jun said. “People don’t fly backwards when they get hit by energy weapons, except in the movies. And you’d need to lay at least a hundred joules on someone before they burst into flame. That crappy little pistol doesn’t pump out more than fifty joules per pulse, max. The air is dirty in here, which also degrades the effectiveness of the beam. But I wanted to show you …” He knuckled his eyes. The last of the mess vanished. “Maybe it was overly dramatic.”

  Kiyoshi wanted to go to Jun, pick him up, and set him on his feet like he was four years old. He still got these urges. They hurt like hell. You could not dry the tears of a projection, nor, if you were rational, treat it like your little brother.

  But Kiyoshi wasn’t entirely rational about Jun. He felt just as angry with Mendoza as if the guy had shot his living, flesh-and-blood brother. He said roughly, “Point made, I hope? You don’t go around waving laser pistols at people. Especially not on the bridge of a spaceship. And you especially don’t threaten the guy who saved your life a few hours ago!”

  He caught sight of the real damage the pulse had done. One of the astrogation screens was dead. The console below it burped smoke.

  “Shit!”

  “It’s OK,” Jun muttered. “I can fix it.” He appeared to haul himself into an upright position, supporting his weight on the fridge. He was acting like there was gravity. That was his projection’s default setting. This meant he really was upset. Or … really distracted.

  “That ITR hauler’s gone,” Kiyoshi said grumpily. “We’ll have to wait for another one, or strike out on our own.”

  Father Tom cleared his throat. “Jun; Kiyoshi … I have to apologize. I gave him the pistol.”

  “You didn’t give it to me,” Mendoza said. “I took it.”

  “But I had an inkling what you might do with it. Sure, I didn’t think it would go beyond posturing.”

  “Not you, too, Father!” Kiyoshi said.

  He’d known Father Tom for years. The Jesuit had worked with the boss-man longer than Kiyoshi had. Kiyoshi had been vaguely aware of Father Tom’s transfer to Luna a couple of years back, but he didn’t know anything about Father Tom’s mission. He hadn’t even been supposed to make contact with the priest on this trip.

  It was obviously too late to worry about that. But what came to Kiyoshi now, as he saw the priest taking Mendoza’s side, was that he didn’t really know him at all.

  “You need to understand how serious this is,” Father Tom said.

  “I understand that I rescued you and him,” Kiyoshi said, “and nearly lost my ship for it. Not to mention my life. Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty serious.”

  “Mendoza has told me what he learnt from Derek Lorna. Your man was waxing on like Churchill, isn’t that right, Mendoza? Apparently they’ve got some scheme to fight the PLAN.”

  “Yeah,” Mendoza said. “Which, I mean, yeah, sign me up ...”

  Kiyoshi laughed at that, he couldn’t help it. Guy barely knew which end of the gun to hold.

  Mendoza gave him a dirty look. “Except, Derek Lorna’s a psychopath. So that’s one problem. And a hundred and seventeen people have already died on Mercury, so that’s another. And he said it’s not over yet. He’s hijacked a bunch of industrial phavatars. They’re going to kill everyone except his friends. And Elfrida’s there!”

  “Industrial phavatars?” Jun said. “How? Telepresence is unhackable.”

  “It wasn’t on 4 Vesta,” Mendoza said. “The Heidegger program hijacked a bunch of phavatars there.”

  “But that was the Heidegger program,” Jun said. “Derek Lorna is just a human being. That sounds wrong, but you get the point.”

  Mendoza spread his hands. Clearly, he didn’t really know anything.

  Father Tom broke in, “Jun, Kiyoshi, I expect you’re aware of what I was doing on Luna …”

  “Not in a whole lot of detail,” Jun said.

  “I was gathering intelligence on Hope Energy’s R&D operations. Ah, we may as well call it spying.”

  “Father!” Mendoza yelped.

  The Jesuit shrugged ruefully, which sent him into a slow spin until he grabbed the door to halt himself. “I wasn’t much of a spy. There are some believers working for Hope Energy who were willing to talk to me. But as a priest, you’re automatically a priority target for surveillance. And I couldn’t put my informants in danger.”

  “But your ministry, Father?”

  “Of course that was my top priority. The Lord comes first, the boss second.” Father Tom gave Kiyoshi a nod, assuming him to have similarly split loyalties. “So I was a spy in my spare time. But as I say, I never got far, until a lucky break fell into my lap.”

  “Me,” Mendoza said.

  “You and your secret forums,” the Jesuit agreed.

  “Wait, what?” Kiyoshi said.

  “This lad’s quite the hacker,” Father Tom said. “He got hold of some survey data from these new Mars probes that the Hopes have been developing, amazing little devices, nanoscale … and he posted it all on the internet.”

  Jun laughed. He shook his head, and laughed and laughed. It made Kiyoshi happy to see it, although he did not share Jun’s inclination to laugh at their own wasted efforts.

  “We were looking for the probes themselves, as opposed to the stuff they brought back,” Jun explained.

  “Wasted a whole month dicking around on Luna, getting nowhere,” Kiyoshi said.

  “Then you must see, it’s all connected!” Father Tom exclaimed. “The Mars probes are a project of the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, which is a subsidiary of Hope Energy. And Derek Lorna is friendly with the Hope family. Ten to one the Hopes are neck-deep in this plot.”

  “Correlation doesn’t prove causation,” Kiyoshi said. The Hopes basically own Luna. They’re involved with everything that happens there.”

  “For Christ’s sake, man! There may be a violent coup on Mercury within the next forty-eight hours! Do you not think it’s worth checking out?”

  Kiyoshi retrieved his cigarette and inhaled. He blew out a prodigious cloud of vapor. Nicotine and THC seeped into his veins, delivering their gifts of calm and distance from the mess he was in, the mess he seemed to have spent half his adult life trying to get out of.

  “It all adds up to something,” he allowed. “Definitely worth telling the boss-man about. But we still aren’t going to Mercury.”

  “W
hy not?” Mendoza shouted.

  “You don’t know much about spaceships, do you? This is a Hitachi-Samsung Longvoyager. It’s almost a century old. I keep meaning to get a new drive, but for that price, you could get a new ship, and I’m kind of attached to this one. We get 70,000 newtons of thrust on a good day. Against that, we mass 100,000 tons, and that’s just payload, not counting propellant mass. So we could get to Mercury, but our delta-V budget would not stretch to getting back again. Sorry.”

  xiii.

  The Longvoyager transport Monster—formerly the Chimera, formerly the Unicorn, formerly the St. Francis—coasted into orbit around Midway 16 hours later. Kiyoshi had changed the ship’s name (again), and Jun had re-registered its transponder with a faked-up record of inner-system haulage.

  Mendoza sat at the comms officer’s workstation, visibly tense. Kiyoshi had promised to slug him if he opened his mouth.

  Traffic Control greeted them with a laid-back “How’s it hanging, Monster?”

  “Could be worse!” Kiyoshi said brightly. “I’m in the market for long-term parking. You got any places available?”

  On the secondary comms screen in front of the captain’s couch, Traffic Control—a very young woman with a shaved head—giggled. “Take your pick, man, take your pick.”

  This was sarcasm. Midway, also known as the L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, owned the record for most-crowded region of deep space. Shipyards, fuel depots, habitats, factory farms, and giant fabs manufacturing everything from ball bearings to pharmaceuticals waltzed in coordinated halo orbits around this libration point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Here, the gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun balanced out. You could hang out here forever, with only modest applications of juice for station-keeping. Kiyoshi’s radar plot teemed with dots, like a mist of blood droplets on the screen.

  Traffic Control guided him through the maze into a halo orbit trailing the Rocking Horse, a habitat that served as Midway’s commercial hub. “We do require a deposit of five thousand spiders for the first week. But as a first-time visitor, you’re eligible for a special discount! So only four thousand spiders.”

  “Thanks,” Kiyoshi said with a lock-jawed smile. It was blatant monopoly pricing. He accessed the account he maintained in the name of Erich-Maria Holdings, LLC, one of his newer front companies, and transferred S4,000 to the Midway Parking Authority. Right now this account had a bit of money in it. But soon it would be empty. Parking fees weren’t the half of it.

  “Got that. Thank you very much! Have a Goddess-blessed day!”

  “You can stay here,” Kiyoshi said to Mendoza and Father Tom. “I’m going to go rent a ship.”

  Rent a ship.

  The boss-man had come up with the idea, after Kiyoshi passed on Mendoza’s information to him.

  If you can’t make it in that rotten old ship, rent a different one. Problem solved.

  What the boss-man said, Kiyoshi did. But he was simmering with resentment. It was easy enough for the boss-man to say, hey, yeah, that could be something. Go check it out. It was Kiyoshi who’d actually have to do it. And spend his own money on it, too.

  He took the Katana—now the Wakizashi—across to the Rocking Horse, alone. Mendoza said he’d like to go, too, but Kiyoshi ignored him. He had not forgotten the smug look on the Filipino’s face when Kiyoshi was forced to reverse his former stance and agree to this crazy mission.

  He stepped out of the Superlifter’s airlock into a small-craft docking bay, one of five clinging to the Rocking Horse’s 32-kilometer length.

  The Rocking Horse was the third-largest space station in existence. It consisted of two parallel, tubular habs that curved through a quarter of an imaginary circle. These were tethered to a convex mirror, in the center of the imaginary circle, which collected the eternal sunlight that shone on Midway. Diametrically opposite the habs, a radial arm supported a counterweight of fused chunks of asteroid rock. More rocks had been added, as the mass of the habs increased, so that at this point in time, the counterweight did indeed look like a horse’s head.

  The Rocking Horse was home to several hundred thousand people. It rotated once every two minutes, producing a pseudo-gravitational effect of half a gee at its rim.

  Kiyoshi felt his internal organs shifting downwards in the unaccustomed gravity. He had to consciously strive not to slouch. He slipped on a pair of sunglasses, to match his favored dirtside garb of head-to-toe black (fake) leather. His hair hung below his shoulders, a surprise—it floated on shipboard, so he hadn’t realized it had got so long.

  The docking bay echoed with mechanical thumps, screeches, and whines. The Wakizashi lay in its horizontal position, like a giant shuttlecock on its side, in a row of similarly sized landing craft, shuttles, and tugs. In-dock automated trolleys carried ships to and from the giant airlocks set into the floor. Humans and bots scuttled around the ships, making repairs, upgrading components, and dangling in harnesses to touch up their bodywork. Even in deep space, people liked to flaunt their artistic talents, or lack thereof.

  Kiyoshi glanced back at his own Superlifter. The Katana had been a present from the boss-man to support his subterfuge on Luna. It had had at least three previous owners, but it still felt new to him—looking at it now, he still thought, I can’t believe that’s MINE.

  But the ugly silver patch on the radome spoilt his pride of possession. One of his nieces had painted a winged giraffe there when he first got the ship. He’d covered the painting with a sheet of insulation foil on their way to Midway. The kludge was obvious, and the lettering he’d slapped on top of the foil (WAKIZASHI @ MONSTER) was wonky.

  ~If you’re going to be the Monster from now on, he subvocalized to Jun, ~I’m going to get us a new logo. I just need to come up with some ideas.

  He meant that in a broader sense. He needed to come up with some ideas for repossessing his life from the forces that had taken control of it.

  It had all started out so innocently. He’d been piecing his trade networks back together, hustling for haulage jobs, working up new money-making schemes—doing everything he could to put 4 Vesta behind him. Then the boss-man had got in touch. New job for you. Interested? Sure, of course I am. When the boss-man puts it like that, you’re always interested. Great, glad to hear it. Ever been to Luna?

  And that was how Kiyoshi had wound up skulking around Shackleton City for a month, trying to get a fix on the alleged location where the Hope Center for Nanobiotics was allegedly manufacturing tiny probes, smaller than a speck of dust, that had allegedly succeeded where all others failed, and delivered pictures of the nightmare the PLAN had wrought on Mars. The boss wanted those pictures. More importantly, he wanted the probes themselves. The concept of undetectable, un-fraggable surveillance tickled his paranoia in the worst way. Kiyoshi suspected that had he found the fab where the probes were being made, he’d have been asked to blow it up.

  But the operation had run into the sand. No one would talk, or at least not to a 2.6-meter Japanese guy pretending to be a purchasing rep for a Ceres-based He3 mining start-up. Kiyoshi had received permission from the boss-man to give up, and he would have been halfway back to the Belt by now … if he hadn’t received a desperate last-minute call from Father Tom.

  And now this.

  “You think we’re doing the boss’s dirty work,” Jun said in his ears.

  ~We are.

  “But what if this is exactly what it looks like? A disaster spiraling out of control? Are we going to pass by on the other side of the road, like everyone else in the solar system?”

  Jun never let up. He just kept hammering away at you. That hadn’t changed since he was alive in the flesh.

  “Thousands of people on Mercury are in danger. Could you live with yourself if we didn’t try to save them?”

  Easily, Kiyoshi thought. His own people had sacrificed everything for their faith. That made sense to him, but Jun’s understanding of Christianity demanded even more. It demanded sacrifice for complete fucking strangers.
That was where Jun and Kiyoshi parted ways. Except they couldn’t part ways, because Kiyoshi’s ship was Jun, and Jun was the ship.

  ~I’m not happy about leaving you here alone, he subvocalized.

  That was an excuse, but it was also true. According to the boss’s plan, the Monster would stay here while Kiyoshi went to Mercury in a rented ship. Kiyoshi was not at all happy about that. Midway had a mellow, anything-goes vibe, but the place was infested with chancers who’d steal the implants out of your skull if you blinked. That was, unfortunately, typical of deep-space settlements. They had nothing except what they could grab as it went by. And if it was in long-term parking? You might as well put up a sign saying FREE SHIP PARTS.

  “I won’t be alone,” Jun said. “I’ve got my brothers.”

  ~So ne [Yeah, I know], Kiyoshi subvocalized. He walked past Big Bob’s Bodyshop, Sensors Unlimited, Drive Solutions For LeSS, and Julissa’s Pre-Owned Parts. The roof of the docking bay was a full kilometer overhead. Propellant gas hazed the air. A small man in a helicopter beanie, which enabled him to fly in the Rocking Horse’s gravity, buzzed the crowd, shouting, “What can I do to get you in a HIGH-SPEC, LIGHTLY USED ship today?!” Kiyoshi smiled at the salesman’s antics.

  Jun popped up ahead of him. He stood amid the colorful throng like a small black stone. Jun was a monk of the Order of St. Benedict of Passau, or at any rate, he had been one when he was alive, and he claimed still to be one. Kiyoshi did not think anyone had consulted the good fathers in Munich about whether they accepted AIs.

  “There were nine crusades in the Middle Ages,” Jun said. “One in the 21st century. That makes ten, and now there’s us.”

  Kiyoshi twisted his head.

  Jun’s projection moved to stay centered in his field of vision. “There’s only us.”

  “There’s everyone at home. There are the folks on Ceres. There’s that crazy lady, Domenika, that Father Tom is obsessed with.”

  “Do they give a damn about Mercury?”