The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3)

by Felix R. Savage

  “Hi,” the Space Corps girl said, fiddling with a stylus. She was petite and sultry, no older than they were. “I’m Gloria dos Santos. I’ll be your conflict resolution facilitator today. Um, nice to meet you. Charles?”

  “C-Mutt,” the secret student of legal history drawled.

  “And, um, Drayawray?”

  “That’s DrayAWOOray, you pronounce it.”

  “Got it.” Dos Santos made a note on her tablet. “I understand that there was a disagreement over, um, a tin can?”

  C-Mutt exploded. The tin can was his. He didn’t mind people looking at it, but this fucker had no right to fucking touch it. It was fucking valuable. C-Mutt was going to sell it to a museum, and he didn’t want some fucker’s fucking fingerprints on it.

  “You ain’t selling that shit to no museum,” Drayawray jeered. “You can pick those up offa the fucking ground where I come from.”

  “In pristine fucking condition? With the original contents?”

  Gloria dos Santos said desperately. “Guys? Guys, where did you find this tin can, anyway?”

  “I found it,” C-Mutt growled.

  “Sorry. Charles?”

  C-Mutt explained that the Marines operated the escort vehicle for the UNSA phavatars exploring Callisto’s other great crater, Asgard. The vehicle was a RORSS (Remotely Operated Roving Support System). It carried a hydrogen-fueled generator to recharge the phavatars, and it shuttled the samples they collected back to Valhalla Base.

  “As you know, ma’am,” C-Mutt said, “the first base on Callisto was in the Asgard area, more than a century ago. But they all died, and the UNSA guys are looking for clues as to what went wrong. So that’s where I found this. Wanna see?”

  C-Mutt unwrapped the famous tin can. Angelica had seen it already. Standing against the wall of dos Santos’s office, waiting to be questioned as a witness to the fistfight, she watched dos Santos. She felt sorry for the girl. Her severe ponytail and UN-blue uniform had no chance of hiding her looks, and she had no chance of getting the Marines to take her seriously. Angelica knew how that felt.

  At the same time, Angelica felt a twinge of irritation. Dos Santos might not know it, but she was getting suckered into C-Mutt’s game, letting him call the plays.

  The can had a flag on its label, somewhat discolored from having lain for 150 years in the radioactive snow of Callisto.

  “Wow,” dos Santos said. “Isn’t that the flag of the United States of America?” She reached out to touch it.

  C-Mutt whisked his treasure away. “That’s right. The first explorers were Americans. They were United Statesians. And this is what they ate.” He read off the can. “Spam.”

  “Betcha that’s why they all died,” Drayawray sneered. “You ever see any meat that color?” He made the wee-wonh wee-wonh noise of a radiation alert.

  “The can’s radproof, ya meatbrain.”

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” dos Santos said. “Once upon a time, the United States was the mightiest empire in the solar system. They colonized Mercury, they colonized Mars, they were the first to explore the Jovian moons. Now—gone.” She spread her hands as if releasing something. Angelica thought of birds. “Maybe the UN will go the same way, eventually. Maybe the PLAN will finish us off. Or maybe CyberDestiny is right, and our own bots will outcompete us.”

  They all laughed. The activist collective CyberDestiny had made a splash by calling on the UN to recognize the equality of mechanical intelligences. Everyone considered this to be deranged.

  “Anyway, when you look at the long run,” dos Santos concluded, “it really puts things in perspective. What’s the point of knocking each other around, when we’re all out here together, 650 million kilometers from home? Just hug and say sorry, guys.”

  Angelica hid a smile of admiration. Dos Santos had known what she was doing all along.

  As they drifted out of the Space Corps office, dos Santos said to Angelica, “I guess we didn’t need you, after all. Sorry to waste your time.”

  “That’s OK,” Angelica said. “What else have I got to do?”

  She drifted through the hole in the stiffened fabric wall that led to the admin module. REMF country. Open-plan, this module resembled a factory floor, with standing desks protruding from the sides of clunky machines called ‘centers.’ This module housed the base’s key life-support functions, and the UNSA techies who managed the machines, and the admins who managed the techies.

  Angelica snagged a grab handle on the side of the comms center, waiting for C-Mutt to catch up so they could head back to the barracks together.

  She heard dos Santos whisper behind her. “Charles, I wonder if I could ask. Is there any new information regarding that spaceship?”

  ‘That spaceship’ was a resupply barge that had arrived in Callisto orbit two months behind schedule. Its profile checked out, but there was some issue with its security certificates. The civilians weren’t supposed to know about it. Of course they all did. Angelica could see the ship from where she stood, over the shoulders of the guys on comms duty. It looked like a fly crawling across the face of Jupiter.

  “Nothing yet,” C-Mutt answered, also whispering. “We’re in contact with the haulage coordinators at UNSA, but you know how long it takes to get any information out of them.”

  As if he was handling it himself, Angelica thought irritably. In fact, C-Mutt knew no more than anyone else. He just gave the impression that he did.

  She understood that she had a touch of hab-sickness. This was a technical term for “wanting to punch people because you can’t get away from their stupid faces.” Hab-sickness had been the underlying cause of the fight between C-Mutt and Drayawray. It came suddenly to Angelica that the biggest threat they faced out here was each other, and Gloria dos Santos might yet turn out to be the most important person on base

  “Oh my dog,” one of the comms techs yelped.

  Then the hab leapt under their feet, and Angelica was back in California, reliving the earthquake that had flattened everyone she loved.

  xvi.

  Elfrida did not go to bed that night. She sat alone in her sandcastle, her pink carpet wrapped around her shoulders, watching the fallout from Sexbotgate.

  At midnight, she disconnected her contacts from the network. She took her phone off. Then she put on an extra layer of thermals and slipped out of the sandcastle.

  The village was quiet. Too quiet.

  Circadian rhythms were an irrelevance in the test hab, where each night lasted months. Most people kept to the officially ordained 24-hour cycle, but the unemployed and the illegals tended to hang out in the square around the clock, cat-napping when they felt like it, playing games on cheapo home immersion kits.

  Not tonight.

  Sneaking through the streets, Elfrida was so frightened she felt feverish. But she couldn’t turn back. Vlajkovic and his friends were going to stage their assault tonight, sometime before dawn in the main hab.

  She had a narrow window of time to stop them. And she could think of only one way to do that.

  She ran across the desert, zigzagging between patches of groundfish.

  Down in the parking lot, she selected the rover that she and Vlajkovic had taken out two weeks back. (She remembered the Brainrape and Thud ‘N’ Blunder bumper stickers.) She whizzed through the pre-EVA checklist.

  When she turned the engine on, music thundered through the parking-lot. She couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. But no one came running to investigate. They were probably all holed up in the Hobbit Hole, counting bullets.

  If only she wasn’t too late!

  To deafening howls of “Aliens! Will eat! Your braaaains!!!” she drove into the airlock.

  The rover’s log provided her with a record of her previous journey with Vlajkovic. It was annoying that the rover had no autodrive, but she was able to follow the coordinates across the floor of the crater, and down the ramp to the UNVRP water mine.

  As soon as she was underground, the satellite n
avigation crapped out. She remembered Vlajkovic saying that there was no network coverage down here. Well, she could remember the route they’d taken. Pretty much.

  She drove slowly between the pillars of ice. A mining bot scurried across the rover’s nose. She followed it to the working face. This was where they’d parked last time. She wriggled into an EVA suit took a deep breath of canned air, and exited the vehicle.

  She immediately felt chilly, as if the intense -170° cold were penetrating her suit.

  Imagination. Don’t let it run away with you, Goto.

  Using her helmet lamp to illuminate the scene, she watched the bots chopping chunks of ice and stacking them on the automated trolleys.

  When one of the trolleys set off, she followed it.

  The trolley moved fast, whisking around the pillars like a centipede. Elfrida had to jog to keep up. She forgot how little headroom there was, and how little she weighed here. Her helmet whacked into the roof. She tumbled to the ground and slid helplessly across the ice until she crashed into a pillar.

  Vlajkovic’s voice echoed in her mind: …one failure could kill everyone down here …

  She sat up. The mine had not collapsed. Her forehead throbbed where it had banged against the inside of her helmet. This suit was so old it didn’t even have crash protection.

  “SUIT COMMAND,” she said breathlessly. “Integrity check!”

  The suit’s computer—it was too dumb to qualify as an MI—took an age to run its checks. Elfrida concluded in advance that it wasn’t damaged, based on the fact that she wasn’t dead.

  But the trolley she was following had vanished.

  Her helmet lamp flashed across ice pillars, all of which looked exactly the same.

  She had no idea where she was, or which way to go.

  “Pressurization 100%,” her suit said. “Telemetry sensors undamaged. Air supply undamaged. Spare oxygen tank missing.”

  “MISSING?!”

  Elfrida felt around her back. It must have come off when she fell. She whirled around, looking for it.

  “Primary tank contains sufficient oxygen for thirty-seven minutes at average levels of exertion. Please top up within thirty minutes. This completes my integrity check.”

  23 Years Earlier. Callisto

  The hab stopped shaking. The REMFs milled in panic. Angelica kicked them out of her way. She had to get out of here. Get back to barracks. Get her Zero.5.

  C-Mutt crouched in front of the valve that led to the flexitube. He was hitting anyone who tried to reach it. “It’s gone!” he yelled. “Gone, gone, fucking gone!”

  “What’s gone?” Angelica yelled back.

  “The fucking barracks! Go through this door and you die!”

  The main viewport screen in the admin module had whited out. Angelica pushed off from the wall and jumped back to the middle of the room. She landed on top of the people clustered around the life support center.

  They were watching the feed from one of the remote cameras the Marines had installed on the rim of Valhalla Crater.

  The base looked all wrong.

  The drilling rig had fallen over.

  And where the barracks module should’ve been, there sat an UNSA lifeboat. Its drive shield glowed red-hot, cooling.

  It landed on the barracks.

  “The fucking meatbrains,” Angelica said. “They miscalculated their fucking landing, the fuckers.”

  There were a hundred and fifty Marines in there.

  The lifeboat sat in a ring of pulverized wreckage.

  The tube connecting the barracks to the admin module had also been fragged. Its end stuck out of the side of the admin module like a root sprouting from an old potato. If the tube had been a bit shorter, or the modules a bit closer together, they’d be dead now, too.

  The experimental hydroponics module was also totaled. A piece of the barracks must’ve punctured it. Explosive decompression.

  “Zoom in,” someone begged.

  “This is it.”

  “That doesn’t look like a robo-drop! It looks like a ship!”

  Dog, these REMFs were slow. “Yes, it’s a ship,” Angelica said. “It’s the Farhauler’s lifeboat.”

  They all turned to her. “Whose lifeboat?”

  “The Farhauler’s?”

  “You mean, that supply ship that arrived late?”

  “So it’s not the PLAN?”

  That same thought had flickered through Angelica’s mind, but only for a second. The PLAN’s m.o. was to nuke you from orbit. They did not land on your doorstep in someone else’s spaceship.

  “Not the PLAN,” she said. They were staring at her like she had the answers. Where were Sergeant McWhorter? Captain Malouf?

  Dead.

  She bounded back to C-Mutt. “What the fuck is going on?”

  C-Mutt didn’t have the answers, either, but he at least knew how to act like he did.

  “Dray! Stand down! Await orders, you dumb fuck!” he yelled at Drayawray, who was guarding the airlock, swinging a chair at anyone who tried to get into it and get at the EVA suits inside.

  “There is no one to give orders, C-Mutt. They’re all fucking dead.”

  He exhaled sharply. “I know.”

  “Do it, C-Mutt. Take charge. Reassure the civilians. You might even get a citation. Promotion to officer.”

  “More likely, we’ll get blamed for everything.” He raised his voice. “All right! Everyone stay fucking calm! Return to your desks! Do not attempt to leave the module at this time! We do not know what the fuck just happened, but comms is on that, ain’tcha, comms?”

  “I can’t raise anyone,” the civilian comms officer warbled. “I think our transmitter is fucked.”

  “Cheese. All right! There are an estimated forty Marines patrolling the area, who won’t have been affected by the, uh, unscheduled landing. Some of those teams have UHF transmitters. We will get in touch with them and they can contact the Serge Gainsbourg.”

  This was the Space Force Heavypicket stationed in orbit around Callisto, which had been shadowing the Farhauler.

  “In the meantime—”

  A life support tech screeched, “They’re coming out!”

  Everyone rushed back to the screen, including C-Mutt and Drayawray.

  The lifeboat’s airlock had opened. Stairs extended at an angle that skimmed the still-hot drive shield. Spacesuited human beings emerged. An unacknowledged dread lifted from Angelica’s heart.

  “Phew,” someone muttered, expressing her own thoughts. “There still aren’t any aliens.”

  Everyone feared deep down that aliens would show up in the solar system some day.

  But today was not that day.

  The invaders were human. And carrying guns. That was all Angelica could see, given how far away the camera was.

  “Who are they?” Gloria dos Santos begged.

  C-Mutt faced the airlock. “I think we’re about to find out.”

  xvii.

  Elfrida gave up her search for the spare oxygen tank. It must have come out of her suit’s webbing when she fell, and rolled away. Or maybe it had been missing all along, and she hadn’t noticed until she ran an integrity check.

  She tried to breathe slowly and mindfully, like Louise 361AX had taught her. That would use less oxygen.

  Do not panic.

  She was already panicking.

  They’ll notice my emergency beacon. They’ll come and find me.

  She had triggered her emergency beacon as soon as she realized she was a) lost and b) low on air. Fifteen minutes ago.

  But what if they don’t come?

  After all, there was no network coverage down here. So how was her emergency signal meant to reach the hab?

  Maybe the beacon transmitted on a satellite frequency.

  In which case, it was designed to be used on the surface.

  Maybe Vlajkovic had told her about it just to make her feel safe, neglecting to mention that it wouldn’t work down here.

  Other possibili
ties crowded her mind. The beacon was working, but they were ignoring it, to punish her. Or, no one had noticed it because the rebellion had already started.

  “Fourteen minutes of oxygen remaining,” her suit said.

  Elfrida broke into a run. She sprinted through the abandoned room-and-pillar excavations like a rat in a maze. She was careful to keep her head down on her long leaps this time.

  “Eleven minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  A tunnel mouth yawned. This had to be the way to the water processing plant.

  The floor sloped down.

  Or, not.

  Still, a tunnel had to lead somewhere.

  Didn’t it?

  Out of breath, Elfrida dropped back to a walk. “Oh God, don’t let me die like this. Please. I was baptized on 11073 Galapagos, remember? I signed on with Your crowd—”

  —not that she’d ever lifted one finger to follow up on that. She’d gone on with her life as if it had never happened—

  “—and I know You’ve been looking out for me. You saved me on 4 Vesta, didn’t you? Please, help me find the way out. Please, please. I’ll do whatever You want, just please please don’t let me die down here. Please. Please. Amen.”

  Her helmet lamp glanced off a solid black wall.

  Ice in front of her, ice to the left of her, ice to the right of her.

  The tunnel was a dead end.

  “Six minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  Elfrida battered the wall with her gloves.

  “Five minutes of oxygen remaining. Please top up now.”

  Abruptly, the fight went out of her. She sat down in a heap on the tunnel floor.

  23 Years Earlier. Callisto

  The muzzle of a flechette cannon poked out of the airlock. The three Marines, lined up shoulder to shoulder, tensed. None of them were armed. It was against regs to carry weapons in the admin module. Angelica clenched her fists helplessly.

  The airlock opened the rest of the way. The flechette cannon emerged, together with the man who was aiming it at them. He wore an UNSA spacesuit, minus the helmet. Angelica thought idiotically, You’re too pretty to work for UNSA. He didn’t, of course. Whoever he was, he’d stolen this spacesuit, just like he stole the lifeboat.