“Well, that clinches it,” Kiyoshi said. “Because if they were going to attack a symbolically important target near Earth, they’d definitely warn us beforehand. They wouldn’t use their stealth technology to hide their expeditionary fleet. Of course not.”
“They probably wouldn’t,” Jun said. “That would be a massive expenditure of data.”
“And they wouldn’t be mustering a fleet at all if they were not up to something,” Father Tom said.
“Something, but what?” Jun said. “I don’t know what it all means.” Coming from an ASI, this was an unnerving admission. “Father, I know you already celebrated Mass today, but can we have an extra Mass later? It’s the feast day of the Martyrs of Nagasaki. I think we need to pray for their intercession.”
“Of course,” Father Tom said.
He invited some of his new Chinese friends to the special Mass, held in the Monster’s chapel. The Chinese stared and chattered. Kiyoshi scowled. He didn’t like having them aboard. There was no rule that said a convict couldn’t also be a spy. But they surprised him with fervent and mostly accurate responses during the liturgy, which Father Tom said in Latin. The Jesuit was turning out to be an effective harvester of souls, now that he was no longer constrained by UN laws against evangelization.
After the Mass, Kiyoshi saw the Chinese off the ship and got on the screen with the boss-man. This time their conversation lasted ten hours.
Maybe the boss had some reason to take the rumors of a PLAN attack seriously, or maybe it was something he saw in Kiyoshi’s face. At any rate, he finally relented. “OK. Come on home. I’ll tell the dickhead to find another ride.”
“Banzai!” Kiyoshi shouted. He got out his guitar, which had been gathering dust, and strummed chords while he ran pre-launch checks. Jun undertook the delicate task of disengaging from his months-long conversation with the Chinese AIs.
He, too, was happy to be leaving Tiangong Erhao, although it would mean swinging around Venus to get a gravitational boost out to the asteroid belt.
★
Auxiliary boosters sputtering, the Monster edged out of Docking Bay 14. Kiyoshi started the countdown to full thrust. He loved their new drive. It felt great to be sitting on top of such an abundance of power. Watching the temperature inside the tokamak climb from a cold start into the 40 million Kelvin range, he entirely understood why Derek Lorna and his co-conspirators had risked everything to get their hands on Mercury’s helium-3. D-He3 fusion left the old D-D kludge standing. Fewer nasty neutrons, too.
With half an eye, he watched Tiangong Erhao shrink on the optical feed. Sayonara, Heavenly Palace 2. His curiosity had been gratified. He would not be coming back here again.
“Uh oh,” said Jun, hunched at the astrogator’s workstation.
“What?”
Incoming messages blizzarded across the comms screen. Kiyoshi flew over to the comms workstation and picked one at random. From the Luoxiao Shan. “Yeah, hello?”
The response came in rat-a-tat-tat Chinese. On the screen, a plump little woman gestured angrily. She wore a severe gray uniform, and floated on what looked to be a ship’s bridge, amid geode-like clusters of exposed equipment.
Kiyoshi cued up the Chinese translation software he had installed in his BCI. It was buggy. Fine for dickering over the price of cijiwu, not so great for formal occasions. He was still trying to sort through the mistranslations it printed on his retinal implants when Jun interrupted.
“Turn around. We have to go back.”
“Back to Tiangong Erhao? Why? What’s this chick so upset about?” Kiyoshi felt a bit dazed. “Who or what is the Luoxiao Shan, anyway?”
“Check the optical feed.”
The sight clarified Kiyoshi’s thoughts. Several large, gnarled needles drifted around the Monster. More blips moved closer, twinkling around the distant lozenge of Earth.
“The Luoxiao Shan is a frigate of the China Territorial Defense Force,” Jun said in a leaden voice. “So are those others.”
The nearest Chinese ship was only a few thousand klicks away. But Kiyoshi figured he could shoot his way out of this. The Monster had a hypervelocity coil gun running the length of its spine, disguised as part of the ship. It could hurl any kind of projectile you gave it, but Kiyoshi now favored mini-nukes, which were non-lethal, when used as area-denial weapons to fry an opponent’s electronics.
Jun had used up a bunch of these nukelets on Mercury, but the Monster still had a few left, ready to walk themselves into the cradle on their little mechanical legs.
“Nan to iu baka,” Jun groaned. [What an an idiot I’ve been!] “I thought they’d let me leave. I thought I’d established a rapport with them. I thought we might even be friends. But they don’t have friends. They only have reasons to despair, and reasons to keep living, and there’s very little difference between the two.”
Kiyoshi whipped back to the comms screen. On the bridge of the Luoxiao Shan, the CTDF officer had turned her back to the camera. She was slapping her ample behind, looking over her shoulder and shouting, according to his translation software, “Beware the butt-fragging of righteousness, O filthy brown dwarf!”
“She called me a dwarf,” Kiyoshi said, looking down at his 2.6-meter frame.
“It’s a literal translation of Jap.”
“How rude! I still don’t understand what the CTDF is doing here.”
“The Chinese aren’t ignoring those rumors of an impending PLAN attack. This squadron has come to defend Tiangong Erhao, just in case it’s the intended target. My so-called friends on the station knew it was coming. But they didn’t warn me. They thought it would be amusing to see what happened when we bumped into the CTDF.”
“But the CTDF isn’t combat-capable. The Chinese don’t give their AIs guns. Just mines and EMPs and stuff.” Kiyoshi was dialoguing with the gunnery computer. “We can take them. Get ready to enable the Ghost. I’ll put a nuke right between the Luoxiao Shan and the Zijin Shan. See how they like being EMPed. Then we run like hell.”
“Don’t you remember what they did on 4 Vesta?” Jun said. His projection had its head in its hands. “They slagged the gates of the Bellicia ecohood with a ship drive. Those are their weapons. And in case you didn’t notice, the Luoxiao Shan and the Zijin Shan have both come around in the last few seconds to show us their butts.”
“Oh,” Kiyoshi said. “So it wasn’t a mistranslation.”
Jun started to speak in Chinese, urgently.
“What’s happening?” Father Tom yelled, over the radio from the chapel where he had gone to pray for a successful launch.
“Well,” Kiyoshi shouted back, “It looks like we’re not going to get butt-fragged. That’s the good news, and now for the bad news. We’re going back to Tiangong Erhao. And this time, we’re not customers. We’re prisoners.”
xxvi.
Mendoza went up to Luna on a first-class ticket paid for by Hope Energy. A girl from Hope HR met him at Faustini Spaceport. Her effusive welcome made a stark contrast with his last departure from this spaceport. They flew north in the HR girl’s Grasshopper, a dinky little vehicle that was the Luna equivalent of a car—but much more aspirational: few could afford them.
“It’s a company car,” the HR girl said with a big smile. “But I think you’ll be getting one of your own. The D.I.E. guys generally do.”
Mendoza leaned back and looked out of his porthole. The charcoal plain of the Mare Nubium stretched to the east. Scalloped crater rims lay to the west. The Grasshopper rose to 1000 meters and began to descend again.
“We’ll reach the Marius Hills region in about five hours,” the HR girl said. “The campus is in Hopetown. Exciting, isn’t it?” she added ironically, gesturing at the moonscape. “You can stretch out in back if you like.”
But Mendoza stayed where he was, looking down at Luna, which he had never expected to see again.
“You’re not an expert at anything,” Elfrida had said, when he told her he was taking the job. “What do they want you
for?”
“Thanks a bunch,” he’d said, pretending to be insulted.
“You know what I mean! It’s totally suspicious. Hope Energy backed the Mercury rebellion. They helped Derek Lorna, funded his institute. They’re murderers by proxy. And now you’re going to be taking their money.”
“It’s not about the money. You won’t let me come to Rome to be with you. You won’t come to Manila to be with me. I can’t sleep on my mom’s couch forever.”
“Oh, so now it’s all my fault. You know I have to be at the ICJ like, every day, answering their questions about Mercury. Whereas you’re just sitting around!”
“What I said. I need to start working again. And this is a good job.”
But he could not tell her the real reason he had accepted Frank Hope IV’s offer. He didn’t want her to get sucked into what might turn out to be a dangerous enterprise.
They’d given him a job as a data analyst. Same old, same old. But he believed there would turn out to be more to it. And he was right.
★
Frank Hope IV, a.k.a. Fragger1, laid it out at the cocktail party held on Mendoza’s first evening on the Hope Energy campus. This glittering event, thronged with the elite of Marius Hills, was not in honor of Mendoza; it was a weekly thing. “We’re a big driver of the Lunar economy,” Frank Hope IV (“Call me Frank”) said. “With great power comes great responsibility, you know? Hence the CSR stuff, and hence, also, the Department of Intrepid Exploits.”
“Tell me more,” Mendoza said.
“Information acquisition. That’s where any successful campaign starts. You’re already familiar, of course, with the Hope Center for Nanobiotics’s work in the area of Mars surveillance ...”
Mendoza flushed.
“Relax,” Frank said, grinning. “Your, ahem, unauthorized release of our survey data was actually helpful. It created interest in our work. We were getting unsolicited expressions of support from all kinds of influencers. So when you left the forums, I created Fragger1 to keep up the good work.”
“Your manifesto-type stuff was really inspiring.”
“I was bored,” Frank said. “Sitting around always makes me angry.”
“Me, too.”
“Well, you won’t be sitting around at D.I.E. You’ll be analyzing the data sent back by the latest batch of Mars probes.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah.” Frank took a swig of his highball. Catching his eyes for a second, Mendoza knew he was in the presence of someone else who shared his passion. His desire for revenge.
“Dust. We call the probes Dust. I ought to warn you, though,” Frank added. “The program’s kind of stalled at the moment. You may have heard about the catastrophic breakup of a space station at the L2 LaGrange point, a few months back. That was our fab and launch facility.”
“Oh shit,” said Mendoza. He had had too many highballs in an effort to feel less nervous. “Wasn’t that where they caught Derek Lorna?”
Lorna’s name fell into the arched, pillared room like a stone crashing through a window. The chit-chat around them faltered. Someone dropped a plate. It bounced, scattering canapés on the artificial diamond floor.
“Still a bit of a touchy subject,” Frank said in a low voice, as conversation resumed. “He’s out on bail. Hiding at home in Shackleton City. Guess he can’t face seeing anyone. No one wants to see him.”
“He ought to be in jail.”
Frank pushed the heel of his free hand against his knife-blade nose. “Yeah. He’ll wind up in jail for sure. Even my father would welcome it at this point, so we can put the whole Mercury fiasco behind us.”
“Why did he do it?” Mendoza said. He needed to know more about the hazy connection between Derek Lorna and Hope Energy. The Hopes had denied the existence of any connection, of course. But Frank had just admitted there was one. “Did he have … orders?”
“From us? Is that what you’re implying?” Frank’s eyes glinted.
“I guess I am,” Mendoza said.
“Of course he fucking didn’t. Of course we didn’t fucking connive at the murder of four thousand, three hundred and twelve people.”
That was the final death toll from the Mercury rebellion. That Frank knew the exact number spoke well of him.
“I had to ask,” Mendoza said.
“I understand. It’s just … shit. The guy deceived us as much as anyone else. And why he did it, who knows, but in my opinion, it was pure arrogance. You know he developed that super-advanced telepresence platform, the stross-class phavatar? And then it got cancelled for being too smart? Well, Lorna never got over that. He insisted the stross-class was safe, and everyone had overreacted. He kept working on it in secret, which we had no idea about. Then they captured the Heidegger program on 4 Vesta, and it was light-years beyond what he was working on. A supercomputer, and his stuff was a pocket calculator. Can you imagine what that must have felt like?”
“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” Mendoza guessed.
“Pretty much. As far as we’ve reconstructed it, he made a copy of the Heidegger program, grafted on the safety controls he’d developed for the stross-class … and boom, version 2.0. Which, to repeat, we had no idea about.”
“I just need you to tell me that D.I.E. isn’t about murdering people.”
Frank laughed. Holding Mendoza’s gaze, he said, “Cheesy acronym notwithstanding, D.I.E. is not about murdering people.”
“OK.”
“It’s about hitting the PLAN, and hitting them hard.”
Mendoza ate the maraschino cherry out of his drink. “I always thought we should just haul some asteroids out of the Belt and throw them at Mars.”
“I can tell you used to work for UNVRP.”
“Ha ha; but seriously.”
“Well, it would be kind of nice to get Mars back afterwards, you know? As opposed to a ring of rubble around the sun.”
Later, as the cocktail party was breaking up, Mendoza stood by a window, admiring the view of Hopetown. As the name suggested, this was a company town. But Hope philanthropy had endowed it with lots of open spaces and lovely architecture. The steeple of Notre Dame de la Lune speared towards the invisible roof of the dome, illuminated by floodlights. A cluster of office buildings in the Victorian style of Shackleton City hid the bulk of the cathedral. Nearer at hand, partygoers bobbled homewards across the lawns of the Hope Energy campus. Dishdashas and burkas this way, tuxedoes and evening gowns that way. Many Arabs lived in Luna’s northern hemisphere, and they had their own dress code, analogous to Shackleton City Victoriana. However, enforcement was less strict up here. The HR girl had told Mendoza it would be fine to come to work in jeans.
Still a bit drunk, he took off his bow tie (other people were doing it) and tossed it to a parlormaid.
Frank appeared beside him. He had a dropdead sexy blonde in tow. As if continuing their earlier conversation, he said, “You know, I always thought the whole reason they came up with UNVRP was because we lost Mars. We were going to terraform Mars. It was going to be humanity’s second home. But the PLAN stole it. So, OK, fine, if we can’t have that one, we’ll have this one! Terraforming Venus is not impossible! Because we say so!”
Mendoza cocked his head. “Well, yeah. Of course.”
After a pause, Frank said ruefully, “And I thought that was a pretty deep insight.”
The blonde laughed.
“But it was never going to work,” Mendoza said. It was easier to believe this, than to accept that an achievable dream had been killed by bureaucracy and bad luck. “The technical challenges were just too big.”
Frank nodded. “But this will work.”
“Tell me more about it.”
★
Hopetown lay bubbled within a glassbrick dome, like the domes of Shackleton City. But when you stepped out into the vacuum and looked up, you did not see the black lunar sky. You saw another, higher roof, decorated with whimsical constellations of LEDs that got reprogrammed regularly.
> The city lay inside a lava tube, one of many that snaked beneath Luna’s surface. Formed by primordial volcanism, some of these lava tubes had collapsed into sinuous rilles, but others remained intact, their naturally arched roofs holding up 20-50 meter-thick slabs of regolith. Marius Hills was one of the biggest lava tubes. It measured four kilometers wide, two high at its apex, and thirty kilometers long—a sublunarean void big enough to swallow the city of Manila. The domes of Hopetown and its sister cities looked minute in this abyss, like glowing puddles on the floor.
Mendoza commuted daily, in his new Grasshopper, from his company apartment in the New Jeddah dome to Hopetown, a distance of three kilometers. The D.I.E. offices were hidden away on the Hope Energy campus, on the third floor of the R&D center.
Mendoza sat at a tri-screen workstation in the analysis section, searching the universe for traces of Dust.
“Here’s the problem,” Frank told him. “Our last batch of Dust has gone missing.”
“Did the PLAN blow it up?”
“We don’t think so.” Frank’s normally sparkling eyes were flat. “On our first launches, we used unmanned shuttles. That didn’t work so well. So then we used phavatars to pilot the ships. That worked better. But we—they—still got blown up.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. That’s when we knew, this is never going to work with a signal delay. We need to be flying these shuttles in real time. So on this last launch, that’s what we did.”
“… Oh.”
“Three shuttles successfully launched from the Hope Center for Nanobiotics on June 18th. For various reasons, the launch was a bit rushed. But they all got off OK.”
“And then?”
“We lost contact with all three pilots as they were making their final approach to Mars. One of them, a friend of mine, Victoria McFate, she reported that she was looking at the northern polar cap. She could see the PLAN’s water mines, she could see these scarab-shaped bots climbing around in there.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 120