The pineapple-haired MC came back. This time, simultaneous translations into English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese flashed up on the big screens dotted through the bay.
Tiangong Erhao shuns the Ten Nots and promotes the Thirteen-And-A-Half Yeses!
The convicts applauded.
We are gathered here today to celebrate the deliverance of this space station! Some irresponsible individuals recently circulated rumors that Tiangong Erhao was in danger of being attacked by the PLAN. However, the CTDF successfully deterred the aggression of the hateful Martians! Thanks to the preparedness of our armed forces, and to the foresight of the Prime Minister, Tiangong Erhao was not attacked!
Wild applause.
Kiyoshi and the other indies exchanged incredulous looks. “Wait until the news feeds get hold of that,” said the captain of the Hagiographer’s Complaint.
Some of the Belters didn’t get it. Others explained, “They’re celebrating the fact that Tiangong Erhao wasn’t attacked, a couple of weeks after Luna was attacked? How’s that going to go down in Shackleton City?”
“Sure, it looks insensitive. But the Chinese don’t care what we think of them,” a Belter pointed out.
“You have a point, my friend. I’m vidding this, anyway. Should get a few spiders for it.”
The MC continued: Before I introduce our headlining act, I would like to to invite Tiangong Erhao’s most important guest to say a few words! Your imperial highness, if you would be so condescending?
Spotlights converged on one of the private spaceships floating in the middle of the bay. It looked like an oceangoing yacht, to the point of having a foredeck enclosed by a streamlined bubble. This now turned transparent, revealing a crowd of revellers. The yacht was much too far away for Kiyoshi to make out any details, but the big screens displayed closeups of Chinese people in gaudy historical robes.
“Out of their skulls,” Kiyoshi murmured, recognizing the staring eyes and fixed grins of fellow cijiwu connoisseurs.
The camera zoomed in on a Chinese youth as handsome as an action figurine. “Ni hao,” he burped.
Sustained applause.
Pulling himself together, the young man declaimed (and English subtitles said): Dear subjects of my illustrious Father! Remember that you may swim in an ocean, but if you step in a puddle, you will get your feet wet!
The camera cut back to the MC, while cheers resounded through the bay.
Thank you very much, your imperial highness! The MC’S voice trembled with emotion. We will all treasure these words of wisdom from Prince Xi Jian Er, the fourth in line to the Dragon Throne of the Imperial Republic!
“That short-assed waste of oxygen is a prince?” Kiyoshi said.
“They don’t really run the country, you know,” said the Complaint’s captain. “They’re just decorative.”
“Not very.”
And now, I will introduce our headlining artists! the MC continued, after the applause died down (Kiyoshi timed it at five minutes, thirty-seven seconds). Everyone, please give a warm welcome to …. Brainrape!
“You have got to be kidding me,” Kiyoshi said.
The MC dissolved into thin air—she had just been a holograph, after all. The members of Brainrape flew onstage, brandishing their instruments. The drummer was carrying her entire kit, a feat only possible in zero-gee. A smattering of applause greeted the band.
“These guys?” Kiyoshi said. “They’re amateurs.”
“Take that back, man,” the Complaint’s captain said. “They ROOOOCK! This is fantastic! Frug OOONNN!” he bellowed.
Brainrape started to play, while flying through the air on individual mobility platforms. Kiyoshi did not change his opinion. This was just noise, like everything that had gone before it. But a lot of the trekkies seemed to think this was better noise. They pogoed, moshed, and howled in ecstasy. Their enthusiasm contrasted sharply with the reaction from the convicts on the other piers (dumbfounded silence). Therefore, Brainrape naturally kept their mobility platforms hovering in this area, where they were getting the best response.
Kiyoshi folded his arms. Maybe he should give Brainrape a second chance. Two hundred itinerant sleazebags couldn’t be wrong, could they?
Guitar Boy (who had obviously bought a new axe) brought his platform down until it hovered just above the audience. He swan-dived into the crowd
Kiyoshi cursed and reeled back from the instant mosh pit.
Still playing a solo, Guitar Boy floated on his back, being propelled from one pair of hands to the next. His eyes were closed. But just as Kiyoshi slunk past, he opened them.
“OH MY MOTHERFUCKING GOD!” His amplified voice boomed throughout the bay. “IT’S THE FUCKER WHO STOLE OUR SHIP! GET HIM!”
★
“How did you end up here, anyway?” Kiyoshi asked.
He and Brainrape were on one of the yachts in the imperial convoy, waiting to find out how much trouble they were in.
“There aren’t many bands desperate enough to play Tiangong Erhao,” Guitar Boy answered.
“That’s not true,” exclaimed the four-armed drummer. “We were invited. It was an honor. And they were going to pay us.”
“They won’t now,” Guitar Boy said gloomily.
The festival had ended in chaos. Amid the excitement after Guitar Boy—Charles, Kiyoshi reminded himself—accused Kiyoshi of ship theft, many people had forgotten the cardinal rule of zero-gee safety: when you’re in a large space with no gravity, keep your gecko grips on the floor. Dozens of hapless frug-rock fans had drifted away towards the distant corners of the bay. Brainrape had helped to rescue them, using their mobility platforms. Station security had done the rest … and had also corralled Kiyoshi before he could escape.
“We’re broke,” Charles said. “Thanks to you. We spent eleven million on that space truck. Never got a penny of it back.”
“Sorry about that,” Kiyoshi said.
A rectangular, knee-high security droid rolled into the anteroom and instructed them to follow it.
“I hate these guys,” the bassist muttered. If he was talking about the security droid, Kiyoshi agreed. The droids—that was the translation the Chinese used, where English-speakers would have said bot—roosted everywhere on Tiangong Erhao. They resembled wheelie suitcases. Kiyoshi had once seen one unzip itself and kill a convict with a burst of plasma so intense, not only did the convict catch on fire, the people around him got first-degree burns. If you bumped into one by accident, they felt strangely squashy. No one knew whether they were remote-controlled, and if so, by whom. If they were autonomous, they were illegal. In the UN.
But this wasn’t the UN, as everyone kept reminding him.
The droid led them into a red-and-gold stateroom where flamboyantly dressed people slumped on the air. Only about half were Chinese, and the others seemed familiar in that way that meant you’d probably seen them on the gossip feeds. They had whimsical augments—pointed ears, bionic biceps, a 30-cm penis which its proud owner flaunted in a transparent codpiece—and vacant eyes.
The Imperial Prince Xi Jian Er lay wrong way up to Kiyoshi in a hammock, a humanoid bot massaging his bare shoulders.
Kiyoshi grinned at the prince. He had done a few more cc’s of cijiwu during their wait, so he was unfazed by the Imperial Presence. The members of Brainrape tried to turn themselves the right way up to the prince, and bumped into people.
Jian Er pushed his masseuse away. He sat ‘up’ in his hammock, reached for a cuddly toy squirrel, and perched it on his shoulder. “So, about these accusations.” The squirrel spoke in English, while Jian Er spoke in Mandarin. Kiyoshi had to concentrate to pick the comprehensible words out of their duet. “Ship theft! That’s pretty serious. What have you got to say for yourself?”
“I didn’t do it?” Kiyoshi offered.
The prince shook his head sadly. So did the squirrel on his shoulder.
“OK, I did it, but I needed the ship. It was mine to begin with, you know.”
; Goddamn Jun and his goddamn flawed predictive modelling.
“If you were a Chinese subject, you’d get the death penalty,” the prince said. “But you’re not, are you? You’re that dwarf everyone keeps talking about.”
The Brainrape drummer giggled.
“That was a great show, by the way! I’m sorry you didn’t get to finish your set.”
Brainrape sycophantically babbled their thanks.
“Well, I can’t adjudicate the ship theft thing. It didn’t happen here, and we do have to be careful about jurisdiction issues. But I can and will punish you for spoiling the festival.” Jian Er pointed at Kiyoshi. His fingernails were ten centimeters long, twisted like screwdrivers. “What penalty does he deserve?” he enquired of the room at large.
“Space him,” said several people.
“Maybe just make him give us the ship back?” said Charles nervously.
“This isn’t about your ship.” The prince leaned back on the air, interlacing his long fingernails over his bare stomach. “They sent me up here as a precaution,” the squirrel said. “The National Security Committee and [untranslatable] thought that the PLAN might attack Earth. And if they did, they would target us. After all, they’re our own [untranslatable].”
Kiyoshi nodded. Everyone knew about this. The PLAN had started out as an expeditionary force of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, on a mission to reconquer Mars. They had never come back. What came back had been the PLAN—Chinese ships captured, reverse-engineered, stealthed, and now crewed by AIs.
In the meantime, revolution had engulfed the People’s Republic of China, leading to the restoration of imperial rule, or the fiction thereof. So the Imperial Republic of China wasn’t even the same country that had sent that doomed fleet to Mars. But evidently, they still considered the PLAN to be related to them in some untranslatable way.
“So,” Prince Jian Er and his squirrel continued, “it was thought wise to move some of the Imperial Succession out of the country, in case they bombed us. One of my sisters was sent to climb Mount Everest, which she’d always wanted to do, anyway. One of my brothers was [untranslatable], and I was sent up here.”
“The truth,” said a young man with transparent skin, whose organs could be seen pulsing within his torso, “is that they were hoping the PLAN would get you, Jian Er.”
“Very funny. The thing is, I like it here. No one telling me what to do. And the labs! Have you seen what they’re doing up here?” Jian Er’s eyes opened wide. “It’s amazing. Real cutting-edge science. It’s the future.” He clapped his hands, an oddly delicate gesture, sparing his fingernails. “I know! Charles, Anna, Dave, and Jim, as a reward for your excellent performance, you can have a tour of the labs.”
Brainrape gushed sycophantically again.
Jian Er acknowledged their thanks. Then he turned to Kiyoshi. His lips trembled, betraying some powerful emotion. The prince was as changeable as—well, as a person who did a lot of drugs.
“As for you, dwarf! I’ve got something else in mind.”
★
That evening, Kiyoshi sat in the cargo module, astride the glowstrip-coated spine of the Monster. Jun’s abandoned garden curved around him, a scabby brown and grey mosaic.
If he could get Jun to come out and talk anywhere, he figured it would be here.
“I didn’t do anything. Those meatheads started hollering about ship theft, when they should’ve just shut up and played their music. So I’m the one who gets punished. That’s what passes for logic around here. It’s kind of like what’s happening to you.”
What IS happening to you?
He regretted turning the lights on. It was too depressing. Clots of dirt drifted past his face. Jun’s soil substitute was drying up and flaking off the walls. The few sprigs he’d got around to planting were dead.
I should have come in here and watered them from time to time.
“So this prince. He was wasted, off his face. But it turns out he was engaged to a Saudi princess. She broke it off for whatever reason, but he wants her back. He was talking about how worried he was when the PLAN attacked Luna. She’s fine, she was in one of the underground cities up north, but apparently the whole episode made him realize that he can’t live without her. So, guess what?”
A slab of soil substitute came off the wall overhead and broke up.
“He’s sending me to kidnap her. That’s my punishment.” Kiyoshi chuckled aloud. “I get to take the Superlifter. As soon as I’m out of fragging range, I’ll call the boss. I’ll call the ISA. I’ll—I don’t know, but someone has to have the power to make them let you go!”
Silence.
“Jun! I’m taking the Wakizashi, that means I’m taking the mini-Ghost. I need a repo to operate it.”
Silence.
Suddenly, fear overpowered Kiyoshi. He had not dared to log into the St. Francis sim in weeks. Now he made himself do it.
Bodies floated in the air.
The closest one, dressed in a monk’s habit like all the others, was the plump and cheerful sub-personality Peter Akagi. His mouth hung open in a frozen gape. He was drifting towards Kiyoshi. Instinctively, Kiyoshi stuck out an arm to push him away. But without his headset and gloves, he could not interact with the sim, could not even see his own hand. It was like he was a ghost himself.
He flattened himself on the ship’s spine. Akagi drifted over him, one foot scraping through his back.
Jun’s voice spoke. “They died under interrogation.”
“You’re sacrificing them.”
“The CTDF knows I’m hiding something. I have to keep them from finding out what.”
“The Ghost. Let them have it, Jun! It’s not worth this!”
“No.”
“If I take the Superlifter, that’ll be one Ghost they don’t have. We’ll be evens. Would that be such a disaster?”
“Yes,” Jun’s voice said. “World War III, remember? Gonzo’s vision. The Chinese against everyone else. If they get the Ghost, it might give them the confidence to take on the UN. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I were the one to make Gonzo’s dream come true?”
“It won’t come to that. It can’t.”
“No, it won’t,” Jun’s voice agreed. “They know that if they try to search the ship, I’ll self-destruct.”
“Suicide is a sin.”
“What about suicide by butt-fragging?”
“Talk to Father Tom. Please.”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
Tears bulged, distorting Kiyoshi’s vision. He wiped his face. Spoke through his grief. “All right, but I’m still gonna need a repo for the Superlifter.”
He thought: It’ll be him. A lite version. Like he was before he got too smart. I can start over, if worse comes to worst. Get it right this time. Keep him safe.
Don’t let him play with guns.
“You can have Studd,” Jun said.
One of the floating corpses sat up and sneezed. “No! I’m not telling you anything!” he squeaked, and then: “Oh.” Blink. “Luna? Again? Will there be any shooting?”
“The way this is going, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Kiyoshi said.
xxxi.
Mendoza had planned to sneak back into Shackleton City without attracting anyone’s attention.
He had not planned on having a winged princess in tow.
Inevitably, stares followed a two-meter beauty with pycnofiber wings. Nadia’s abaya made her even more of a curiosity: there were not many observant Muslims in Shackleton City.
However, no one interfered with Mendoza and Nadia. They were all too busy trying to stay alive.
Verneland was gone. A kinetic missile had reduced the city’s largest dome to wreckage. Mendoza parked the Moonhawk in a flat area that might formerly have been part of the park around the dome’s circumference. When he and Nadia got out, their EVA suits screeched radiation warnings. The PLAN’s enhanced warheads had left higher-than-normal levels of residual radiation behind, as well as throwing off massive a
mounts of neutron and gamma radiation when they hit. A frozen layer of debris covered the regolith, so pulverized you could not even tell what it used to be.
They hurried on foot to Wellsland.
The Wellsland dome had been breached, but repaired in time to save the lives of most people inside. However, survival could be a fate crueller than vaporization, when everyone had been riddled with charged neutrons.
Wellsland was now a giant hospital.
Medical supplies were arriving from Earth, and evacuations were still ongoing. But the majority of Shackleton City’s population had been born on Luna. For them, evacuation to Earth would mean death. The only option was to treat them right here.
In Wellsland, people queued for blocks, waiting to receive stem cell transfusions and cancer-fighting drugs. Some streets had been turned into open-air intensive care wards, so that a limited number of medibots could efficiently treat what seemed like an unlimited number of casualties.
Human volunteers were working with the bots. Mendoza spotted Dr. Miller, the doctor he’d met at Farm Eighty-One. Then, she’d been put-together, self-righteous. Now, her hair was falling out of its bun, her face dirty. Blood and puke stained her dress.
Mendoza greeted her as she collapsed against a wall for a cigarette break. The mess, the cries, and the stink had upended his priorities. He offered to help.
“Help? No one can help. Oh, hello. Feet all right now?”
“Yes, fine.”
Dr. Miller dragged wearily on her cigarette. “We tried so hard. We dressed up as fucking Victorians to try and pretend we were all the same. It was supposed to hide our differences. Pureblood, mixed-race, no one can tell when you’re trussed up in a corset, or suspenders and a cravat. Right? But it didn’t work. Who were we kidding? They came for the purebloods anyway.”
“They didn’t come for the purebloods,” Mendoza said. “Not this time.”
“Oh yes, they did. I know people are saying it was different this time. Because science. Or something. But if that’s true, how do you explain the fact that the purebloods are dying, and everyone else is recovering?”
“They are?”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 125