“We will beat the PLAN,” Mendoza said, instinctively defending D.I.E. “The only issue is the Dust control software.”
“I wrote that. Never got paid for it, either. Cash flow issues, according to Trey. That shifty son-of-a-bitch. You only have to look at his eyes to know he’s descended from a used-car salesman.”
“Is that why you’re sabotaging D.I.E.?”
“What? Me? Of course not.”
“Someone’s messing with the Dust.”
“Well, it isn’t me.”
“You didn’t make a deal with the UN to sabotage D.I.E. in exchange for the charges against you being dropped?”
“I might have, if they’d made the offer. They didn’t. They want to ship me to Pallas pour encourager les autres. What’s the problem, specifically?”
“Swarm crashes. More and more of them. And even when a whole swarm doesn’t crash, we’ve been seeing inexplicably high loss rates.”
“Well, I agree with you, that does sound like sabotage. And it can’t be someone hacking into the system from outside. The control software is based on LiRI’s telepresence technology, which is unhackable. So it sounds like someone with legitimate access is stealing the Dust for their own use. That would not be good news. When did this start?”
“Right after 9/29.”
Lorna leaned into his screens. “Let me have a look.”
Mendoza reached out and twisted one of Lorna’s screens around. He saw the same operator interface that he saw every day at work. “Hey, how’d you get into the …”
“I built it, idiot. If you want to hold that up as proof that I’m the saboteur, go ahead and abandon all semblance of logical thought.”
Lorna went into the back-end of the system and clicked around in the access log. Nervous, Mendoza glanced at the area of the ceiling where the surveillance camera had to be.
Lorna smiled crookedly. “Don’t worry, we’re not being watched.”
“Actually, we are. I watched you sitting here a few hours ago.”
“A vid loop.”
“Clever.”
“I’ve just fucking had it with pretending not to know that they’re watching, while they pretend not to notice that I’m evading their surveillance ... Holy crap!”
“What?!?”
“You’ve been running the Dust inside Hopetown? And New Jeddah?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Are you completely crazy? That’s …” Lorna caught back his next words. He shook his head. “Too late now. Look. I just compared the access log with the swarm crash reports. This guy’s our doer.”
“Abdul,” Mendoza breathed.
“You know him?”
“He’s dead.”
★
“OK,” Lorna said. “So we’re looking at a case of identity theft. Rare in this day and age, but it happens.”
“There’s something else,” Mendoza said. “Victoria McFate came back, too. She was sitting on Frank’s lap.”
“The dead don’t come back,” Lorna said.
“I don’t believe in ghosts, either,” Mendoza said.
They sat for a moment without speaking. Then Lorna called up a comms map of Hopetown. ID bubbles crowded the dome, concentrated in the residential blocks. Marius Hills was an hour behind Shackleton City, so most people were still at home in bed. But there were also a lot of people on the Hope Energy campus. They’d either come into work early, or pulled all-nighters.
Lorna highlighted one of the individuals in the R&D building. Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud. Then another. Victoria McFate. And a third. Erik Sigurdsen.
“All three of them,” Mendoza whispered.
“That’s not what I’m looking at.”
“What else?”
“All these other IDs? None of them are doing anything.”
★
Kiyoshi bounced through the wreckage in the Haworth crater. Squadrons of salvage bots burrowed in bomb sites. Kiyoshi flew over a row of mangled corpses the bots had recovered. It reminded him of the destruction of 11073 Galapagos. He hadn’t seen that, had been on the other side of the solar system at the time. Now he felt like he had a better understanding of what Jun had gone through.
He breasted the lip of the crater. Urban sprawl clogged the sunlit plateau between Shackleton Crater and the Malapert ridge. After what he’d just seen, it surprised him to see so many domes lit up and functioning.
“I met a girl last time I was here,” he mused aloud. “She offered me a job at her father’s company. The kind of thing, you know, you collect a paycheck, get married, buy property, raise a bunch of spaceborn kids with fragile bones and weak hearts. Sometimes I want that. I want what the PLAN took from me.”
“What was her name?” Studd asked.
“Who?”
“The girl you met.”
“Oh. I forget. She’s probably dead now, anyway.” Kiyoshi sat down on a rock. He tipped his head back and looked up at Earth.
“So what are we going to do?” Studd asked.
We. This warped little sub-personality wanted in on the action any way he could. “What do you mean?”
“Are we going to look for Princess Nadia? Or Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter?”
“Neither.”
“What?”
“Fuck Prince Jian Er. Fuck the boss-man. Fuck that manipulative asshole.”
“So … are we just going to leave Jun … on Tiangong Erhao?”
“We are not.”
“Then … what?”
“We’re going to kidnap Derek Lorna. He’s a criminal genius. And he knows everything about the UN’s robotics programs. I’m betting the CTDF will be willing to trade him for Jun.”
Kiyoshi blinked up his suit’s drugstore, and injected a premixed cocktail of cijiwu and cocaine into his cubital port. The drugs immediately put him into a more cheerful frame of mind. It struck him that he might as well have some fun with this.
Using his suit radio to patch into the local network, he placed a voice call, no vid.
“Hello? Dr. Hasselblatter? Yeah, you don’t know me, but I’m one of your biggest fans … No, no, not the Space Corps. That vid, man. Sexbotgate? That was freaking hilarious …”
★
A man burst into Lorna’s bedroom. He had clothes on now, but Mendoza recognized him from the surveillance vid loop. Actually, he recognized him, period.
“I just got a call from some pleb who says he’s a fan,” Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter exclaimed.
“So what?” Lorna said. “Get over the fame thing, Abdullah. You’ll be happier if you forget you were ever rich and powerful.”
Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter—ex-director of the Space Corps, former candidate for the directorship of UNVRP, and now system-wide object of ridicule—stared at Mendoza. “Who are you?”
“I work for D.I.E.” Mendoza paced the bedroom, slapping the Saudi pistol against his leg. He could not stop thinking about those 19,248 inactive ID bubbles. “We need to find out what’s really happening in Hopetown.” He circled back to Lorna’s makeshift desk. “Can I use one of your screens?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Where’s my kid?” Dr. Hasselblatter said.
“If that was your kid who tried to cut my head off, he’s somewhere around,” Mendoza answered distractedly.
“That’s my boy,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “He’s got it figured out: playing by the rules doesn’t pay off in this solar system. Does it, Derek? Just cut their heads off and call it good. What are you doing?”
“We’re trying to find out whether everyone in the Hopetown dome is dead, or just resting,” Lorna said.
“They’re not picking up,” Mendoza said. “I just pinged Youssef, Jasmine, Abraam, Eliana … everyone. Nothing.”
“Maybe they’re pining for the fjords,” Dr. Hasselblatter said.
“Sounds to me like they’ve rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible,” Lorna said.
“Pushing up the daisies,” Dr. Hasselblatter countered
.
Both men chuckled, while Mendoza stared at them with uncomprehending irritation. Then they gathered around the screens, and Lorna hacked into the optical surveillance feeds from Hopetown.
The feeds showed nothing unusual. In the fake sunlight, people trickled towards their offices, as you would expect at 7:45 a.m. The early Mass crowd surged out of the cathedral. Queues stretched out the doors of cafés. It was the same in New Jeddah.
And yet none of those 42,018 people (the combined populations of Hopetown and New Jeddah) were talking on the phone, or surfing the news, or playing games, or sending emails, or doing anything that involved electronic data transfers to and from the satellite network. The outgoing comms traffic from Marius Hills had dwindled to a dribble of life-support status updates: machines talking to other machines, assuring them that all was well.
It was so unlikely as to be impossible.
Lorna sat with his hands in his lap, staring at the feeds. “Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud,” he muttered. “Victoria McFate. Erik Sigurdsen.”
“The Fragger pilots,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “What about them?”
“What if they’re not dead? What if they reached Mars? And were—killed, taken prisoner …”
“And came back?” Mendoza said.
“They don’t have to have come back,” Lorna said. “They don’t even have to be alive anymore. All the PLAN would have needed was the information in their heads and bodies, including their DNA. To quote our favorite used-car salesman: ‘D.I.E. is protected by top-notch biometric security.’ Well, that’s how you crack it.”
Mendoza reflected that there was a reason people called Derek Lorna a genius. It wasn’t raw IQ that counted, but the ability to make an intuitive leap like this, which seemed obvious the minute someone else said it.
“It could be done remotely, using redirects to disguise the source of the signals,” Lorna added.
Mendoza nodded. “So we’ve found our saboteur.”
“I think so.”
“It’s the PLAN.”
“Yep. They’re using the pilots’ access privileges to screw with the Dust control software. Deliberately crashing swarms. Stealing them. Hiding them, to make you think they’re lost.”
“But what for?”
Lorna stared at him. “When the PLAN steals our technology and uses it against us, has it ever had any goal other than genocide?”
xxxv.
At that very moment, Elfrida Goto was stepping off a commercial flight at Faustini Spaceport. The spaceport had not been badly damaged in the PLAN attack. She rode the ground transfer bus to the terminal, which was clogged with aid workers, porter-bots overloaded with emergency medical supplies, and grimy groups of evacuees. She recognized the scene from her years in the Space Corps. She envied the aid workers their glow of self-righteousness. She hadn’t felt that way in a long time.
Once, she’d been one of the do-gooders. And if things had gone otherwise on Mercury, she might have been one of them still. But now she had a different mission.
She edged through the crowd, clutching her battered old Space Corps rucksack. A looped public announcement warned new arrivals that the local commuter rail network was down. Officials were giving out reservations for Flyingsaucer hops to the city. People turned away impatiently—“I’m going to walk.”
Which had been Elfrida’s plan all along. She selected a quiet corner and changed into her EVA suit, stripping naked in full view of the crowd, which raised some eyebrows. You didn’t do that on Luna. But Elfrida had once been the kind of person who didn’t give a crap about anyone’s stupid rules, and now she had to be that kind of person again.
Sunlight flooded the rim of Faustini Crater, coming in from its usual ominous angle, the sun just a few degrees above the horizon. Elfrida walked through the wreckage of the spaceport’s flywheel farm, where they used to store energy during the long lunar nights. She took one last look at Earth before plunging down into Shoemaker Crater, which was mostly industrial.
Scratch that. Mostly a bomb site.
Although weeks had passed since the attack, salvage bots were still pulling bodies out of the wreckage. Elfrida bounded past them unchallenged. Her EVA suit bore the UNVRP logo on the chest. The logo was all that was left of UNVRP now. Venus would never be terraformed. Humanity’s horizons had shrunk dramatically. A whole future world had vanished. And Elfrida knew exactly whose fault that was.
She had come to Luna to kill him.
No one had given her permission, least of all the ICJ. She had escaped her court-ordered supervision by jarking her therapist, the robot that had been tasked with watching her. An old friend, Magnus Kristiansen, who worked for Médecins Sans Frontières, had helped her get on a flight to Luna. She’d told Kristiansen she was going to look for Mendoza. He’d been happy for her, said it was about time she settled down with a nice guy.
Little did he know Mendoza was millions of klicks away, in the Belt.
There was no one to do this except Elfrida.
And so she walked on.
★
“I have to take a leak,” Mendoza said. “Excuse me.” He stepped out of the bedroom, leaving Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter yelling at the secretaries of important people who weren’t taking his calls anymore.
In the bathroom, Mendoza doused his face with water from the faucet, a rare luxury on Luna. He opened the window and looked out. Bloomsbury’s fake sun had risen, but the dome seemed oddly quiet. Then again, the rich didn’t have to get up for work. Something rustled down below. It was Dr. Hasselblatter’s son, hunting aliens in the long grass.
Back in the bedroom, Lorna and Dr Hasselblatter stood staring at the screens. They were absolutely motionless. Somehow, Mendoza knew just from their backs that something terrible had happened.
He pushed between them.
The screen showed the main optical surveillance feed from the Hope Energy campus. People knelt in circles on the lawn, heads down. An odd posture. Mendoza could not imagine what they were doing.
Something twitched, half-hidden by people’s backs. He reached out to the screen, zoomed in on the thing they were crouched over.
A hand.
Zoom.
A charm bracelet.
Jasmine Ah.
Zoom.
Something was wrong with Jasmine’s skin. The feed delivered pitilessly high resolution. The back of her hand was scabby, pitted. Glistening liquid oozed from swellings.
One of the kneeling people moved, filling the zoomed-in view with a blur of fabric. Mendoza turned and stared at Lorna.
“Those aren’t people,” Lorna said.
“What are they?”
“The Dust, doing what it was made to do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, of course you don’t understand!” Lorna screamed. He went red with rage. His eyes popped like blue marbles. “Because you’re a fucking moron! They’re all morons! And now they’re dead morons! Whose brilliant idea was it to operate the Dust inside the fucking domes? Guess we’ll never know now. Look at them, look at them!”
Mendoza looked at them. He spotted Trey Hope. The CEO of Hope Energy was kneeling with his head down, his rear end in the air, in a knot of people clustered around … something …
The thought popped into Mendoza’s mind: They’re eating people.
“I can’t see the Dust,” he said desperately. “You can’t see it.”
“You can see it fine,” Lorna said, “when there’s enough of it. I estimate there are trillions of probes in that dome now. If not quadrillions. More. I’m just guessing.”
Lorna sat down on the floor and pushed up the right leg of his trousers. A UN-blue electronic cuff ringed his ankle.
“I have a Ph.D,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “The Gray Goo Law exists for a reason.”
“The Dust is bacteria!” Mendoza said. “It doesn’t fall into the category of self-reproducing nanobots!”
“Correct. That’s how they cleverly got around the law
,” said Dr. Hasselblatter. “But it’s a distinction without a difference.”
“Nanotech and biology are two names for the same field, once you reach the sub-micron scale,” Lorna snapped. “We manufacture human tissues in laboratories; we grow computer memory in crystalline solutions. You tell me which is biological and which isn’t.”
“But the Dust isn’t self-reproducing!”
“Oh yes, it is, if there’s enough of it. There’s a thing called quorum sensing. In nature, a few hundred or a few thousand bacteria will lie low, so they don’t provoke an immune reaction. But a few million? A few billion? Your safety mechanism, I suppose, was simply the fact that you weren’t running enough probes for them to self-organize and start to feed. But then you started losing swarms, and those morons in charge must have just assumed they were gone, and issued new batches of probes. They weren’t gone. They were just lying low. Eventually they reached quorum. After that, it would all have happened rather fast.”
“You’re saying everyone’s dead?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. We’ve lost Marius Hills. There’s no one left alive up there.”
A recollection swam into Mendoza’s mind. “The Saudis locked down New Riyadh a few hours ago.”
“Oh, well, then they’ll be all right. Too bad about everyone else.”
A repair bot crawled out from under the bed and started to cut the cuff off Lorna’s leg, using a laser that blazed like a star in the dim room. The smell of burning plastic and singed hair arose. “Careful!” Lorna shouted.
“What are you doing?” Mendoza said.
“Removing the electronic restraint that confines me to this dome. I need to go to the Institute. Gather my team, start shoveling shit.”
“Damage control,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “He doesn’t want to get blamed for this, too.”
Lorna said to Mendoza, “The problem is, I haven’t got transport at the moment. The pigs confiscated my car. How did you get here?”
“In a Moonhawk,” Mendoza said.
“That’ll work.” Lorna froze. “Where did you come from, anyway?” he asked in a choked voice.
“Mockingbird Village,” Mendoza said.
“Oh. OK. Never heard of the place.”
“You will have soon,” Mendoza said, remembering the smell of putrefaction, the ghostly form of Emmeline Diouf, and her silence.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 128