“Hey,” he said.
Dark brown hair, long, needed a wash. Medium brown skin. Thin lips, hooked nose. Typical mestizo face. Dude could’ve been from anywhere—but then he smiled, and his face became so captivating that Angelica almost forgot to clock his accomplices.
There were four of them, which was the airlock’s max capacity. They, too, wore UNSA suits, and brandished laser and projectile weapons. They herded the REMFs to the other end of the module.
REMFs, slow on the uptake: “You from UNSA?”
Woman, square-cut afro, cheek piercings, leaning into the screens at the life support center: “This module secure. Go check out those other modules, Jax.”
All this time, the three Marines, marked out by their uniforms, stood facing the long-haired dude.
“Who’s in charge here?”
He had a surprisingly soft voice. Mid-twenties, maybe. He carried the flechette cannon, fingers splayed outside the trigger guard, like he knew how to use it.
“Me,” C-Mutt said, after a beat. “And who the fuck are you?”
“Someone that’s got you outnumbered, outgunned, and beat.” The dude’s smile widened. “Meh, to be honest, we didn’t mean to land on the barracks. Just got lucky.”
Angelica found herself smiling in response, as if he’d said something funny, instead of admitting to mass murder.
“So I guess I’m looking at the totality of the Space Force garrison.”
“You fucking wish,” said Drayawray. “We got forty, fifty guys out on patrol right now.” The Marines had been patrolling in depth, just to keep busy. “They’re gonna come back up in here and whoop your ass with the wrath of a thousand suns.”
C-Mutt slapped him on the back of the head.
“Thanks for the warning,” the dude said. “I’ll be sure and tell my people to watch out for them. But honestly, even if there are fifty of them, which I doubt, I don’t think they are gonna whoop our asses. For the same reason that the Serge Gainsbourg isn’t gonna interfere. Because we’ve got you.”
The woman at the life support center: “All modules secure, X. Got the scientists. Five LGM guys, nine Liquid Space. Guess the Adastra Arable crew bought it.”
“Great, tell Jax to bring ‘em over here.” The dude shifted his gaze back to C-Mutt. “This is like having thirteen aces in my hand. The media are gonna go ape. For some reason, they always act like scientists are more valuable than grunts.”
“OK,” C-Mutt said. “How’d you pull it off?”
“I bet you can figure it out,” the dude invited him.
“Maybe I can. You must’ve got yourself hired onto the Farhauler. You hijacked it in deep space, and stopped off somewhere to pick up your buddies. That’s why you were behind schedule.” He shook his head admiringly. Angelica tensed. C-Mutt was playing the dude, flattering him to put him off his guard. A hundred and fifty Marines dead and C-Mutt still had his game. If anyone could save them, he could.
The only trouble was, Angelica figured this X dude had a solid game of his own. He’d flattered C-Mutt by appealing to his intelligence. In other words, he’d needed just a few seconds to identify C-Mutt’s weak spot. That was … scary.
She opened her mouth, but Drayawray got there first. “So, we’re hostages.”
“Aren’t you the brainy one,” Nick mocked. Angelica shivered, realizing that X-dude had already decided Drayawray was no use to him.
“What do you want?” C-Mutt said bluntly.
“All we want is for the UN to respect its foundational principles. Equality before the law for you, for me, for them … and for them.” He nodded at his accomplices.
The woman with the afro was standing at the life support center. A wire extended from the console to a port in her temple. She must have one of those new implants, Angelica thought enviously. A Brain-Computer Interface.
Except, that wasn’t it at all.
C-Mutt got it first. “Holy crap. She isn’t human. None of them are. They’re bots.”
“I’m human,” X-dude said. “Cut me and I bleed. Although I’ll blast your head off if you try, just so you’re warned.”
C-Mutt gave an odd, polite little laugh.
Drayawray said, “You fuckers, you fuck, you’re fucking Cyberd-d-d-destiny.”
xviii.
“Six minutes of oxygen remaining,” Elfrida’s suit told her.
Just like on 11073 Galapagos, when she knew that she was going to die, a terrible peace stole over her.
She cleared her throat and spoke into her suit radio. Though it couldn’t transmit, it could still record her voice. “Hey, Jun.”
Maybe someday, someone would find her body, and get this recording to its intended recipient. Although that would be tricky, since Jun Yonezawa was a) a highly capable MI, and b) hiding off the net somewhere.
“I’m really sorry I never got in touch after 4 Vesta. I couldn’t find you … no, that’s an excuse. I wanted to put it all behind me. But whatever you put behind you, will end up biting you in the ass. How’s that for last words? Laugh.”
“Five minutes of oxygen remaining.”
“But what I really want to say is …” She hesitated. “I should have gone with you.”
Jun and his human brother, Kiyoshi, had saved her life on 4 Vesta. They’d taken off before she could even say thank you. Now she understood that she’d needed to say more than that.
“I knew we needed to talk more. I owed you more … more … What was that word? Repentance. The door was open. But I turned away. I just wanted to go home. But when I got there, it didn’t feel like home anymore. That’s what you get for wimping out, crawling back into your designated box, playing by the rules.”
“Four minutes of oxygen remaining.”
“So I came out here, looking for someplace I could belong. Someplace I could be. But now here is in a mess. Typical: everything goes to shit as soon as I show up.”
Self-pity overwhelmed her. Two big tears splatted on the inside of her faceplate.
“Three minutes of oxygen remaining.”
“So … yeah. Deep breath. I remember you used to talk about God. I should have listened. I just assumed it was a bunch of superstitious crap. But now I get it. God is the only answer.”
She was quiet for a moment, living with that revelation.
“But I was so stupid. I turned my back on God. No, it was worse than that, I told Him to frag off, with my actions if not my words. So … no wonder I’m going to end up dying alone in the dark, after all.”
“Two minutes of oxygen remaining.”
The wall she was sitting against moved. She fell over backwards. Light blazed into the tunnel. A spindly mining bot stooped over her. It scooped her up in its front legs and strode back the way it had come.
“Hello? Hello? You alive in there?” a voice blared into her helmet.
“Yes!” she screamed, dangling upside-down. “Please, quick, I’m almost out of air! One minute left! Help!”
“Shee-it,” said the voice. “On it.”
The bot raced downhill, burst out of the tunnel into bright light, and dumped Elfrida on her feet. She swayed, breathing carbon dioxide. Black spots crinkled her vision.
“I got you, hon.”
EVA suits loomed. She fell to her knees. The American flag bulged on someone’s chest. Hands pushed her to and fro, replacing her oxygen tank.
“There!”
Elfrida wheezed—and breathed.
Canned air had never tasted so good.
“Thank you,” she gasped. “Thank you, thank you.”
“Don’t thank us. Thank UNVRP for being cheap. They’re still using the same damn suits we gave them forty years ago. If those valves weren’t compatible, you’d be dead right now.”
Elfrida tried to wipe tears and slobber from her face. Her gloves bumped her faceplate. “D-Doug? I mean, Mr. President?”
“Doug’s fine. Were you coming to see me, by any chance?”
“Yes, actually, I was.”
&n
bsp; ★
“Oh, I feel fine now,” Elfrida said, in response to Doug’s question. “I mean, now that I can breathe. Laugh.”
She took in her surroundings. She and Doug were standing in a large cavern. Floods lit EVA-suited people working around a central tangle of machinery. Thick cables vanished into a shaft.
“Is this your water mine?”
“Yup,” Doug said. “You just had a pretty traumatic experience, Ms. Goto. I know you feel fine, but I believe you ought to get out of that suit and let a medibot look you over. It’s on us.”
“Well, all right. Thank you.”
She needed a face-to-face with Doug, and this would be one way to get it.
As they walked around the hoist, she saw a skip full of ore rising to the surface. Dumptrucks stood ready to receive it.
“Hop in,” Doug said, swinging up into a high cab.
They drove along a broad, dusty tunnel to the Mt. Gotham service entrance. Inside, everyone they met deferred to Doug. Even the elevator seemed to move faster than it had before. Elfrida was processed through the decontamination room in ten minutes flat. They emerged into the parking lot, and Doug led her into the fields on foot.
The sun lamps overhead were just coming on. Their pink-tinted light filled the hollowed-out mountain with the magic of dawn. A flock of birds wheeled over the fields, and dived. But instead of spreading out to land, the whole tightly packed flock vanished, as if they’d moved off the edge of a screen. Watching them, Elfrida trod in a cowpat.
She wiped her boot on the grass. The mishap didn’t disturb her. She was entranced by the beauty of this ordinary field, the ordinary cows watching them from a distance, the ordinary smell of manure, the crisp chilly air. Maybe she was in shock.
She remembered her mission. “Doug—Mr. President—I need to talk to you.”
“We’re almost there,” he said in a tone that shut her down.
They reached a patch of woodland. Bushes filled the spaces between elongated fruit trees. A path between the trees opened out into a clearing where a wooden cabin stood, checked curtains fluttering.
“My little getaway,” Doug said, heavily.
Elfrida sensed that something was wrong. But she faced him, determined to go through with it. “I came here to ask you for help. Mike Vlajkovic and his friends? They’re, I guess, you gave them some weapons. And I’m afraid they’re going to use them. It might be too late already, but if you could use your influence—can you remotely disable the guns?”
Doug was shaking his head.
“No?”
“It is,” he said.
“What?”
“Too late.”
“Oh no, oh no.”
Elfrida sat down on the cabin porch. She knuckled her eyes. If she hadn’t got lost—if she hadn’t banged her head and lost her spare oxygen tank—if, if …
“Want to see? We can get a feed.”
She nodded, numb.
“Stay here.”
Doug went into the cabin and brought out a wall screen. He propped it against the railing of the porch. Elfrida perched on the edge of a glider, biting her nails. Doug slumped in a wicker chair.
Camera’s-eye views flashed by. The feed stabilized on a view of the L1 mezzanine. An individual with pink hair, whom Elfrida recognized as one of Zazoë Heap’s retinue, lay face down on the floor. No one else was in sight. The mezzanine wrapped all the way around the atrium. On the other side, a blue beret, now wearing a blue helmet that covered his/her face, lurked at the entrance to one of the Hotel Mercury radial corridors.
Suddenly, the blue helmet exploded into a red mist. The now-headless peacekeeper stayed upright for a dreadful moment. Then he/she slid down it, out of sight.
Elfrida jumped to her feet, leaned over the porch rail, and threw up.
“Sorry,” she choked, in between retches. “Sorry.”
“I feel the same way, Ms. Goto.”
“That peacekeeper. They shot him or her. They’re really doing it.”
“Looks that way. I’m gonna scan the news feeds, see what they’ve got.”
The bitter taste of vomit filled Elfrida’s mouth. A maidbot rolled out of the cabin and offered her a glass of water. She took it, rinsed her mouth, spit on the grass.
When she sat down again, the screen had split in two. Headlines scrolled down the left side. Gunmen Attack Mercury Peacekeepers … Conflict Erupts on Mercury … Ahead of Vote, Violence Breaks Out at UN Facility … Gunmen Identified as Hasselblatter Supporters.
“This is really happening,” she muttered. “People are dying. Because I screwed up.”
“Wasn’t you, Ms. Goto. Don’t be so quick to take responsibility for other people’s stupidity.”
The righthand half of the screen showed a surveillance-cam view of the life support operations center. Blue berets crowded the room. Medibots attended the wounded. Other peacekeepers tinkered with the consoles, their postures relaxed. They were all wearing rebreather rigs and/or EVA suits.
Doug tapped a corner of the screen. A skeleton in a business suit lay on its back on the floor. It was Dr. Ulysses Seth.
“Is he dead, too?”
“Can’t see him breathing.”
She turned on Doug. “How can you just sit there? You gave them the guns!”
On the screen, the blue berets exchanged high fives.
“They’re winning!” Elfrida surmised. Somehow, it had never occurred to her that Vlajkovic’s rebels might lose.
“Foregone conclusion,” Doug said. “Whoever controls Life Support, controls the hab. True anywhere, but especially over there.”
“Why?”
“Atmospheric recalibration for outcome optimization. Those in the know call it gunking the air.”
“Gunk? Like, fast-acting SSRI aerosols, like the cops use on Earth?”
“Knockout gas. We installed that capability in the Hotel Mercury era, in case the tourists started acting dumb. Never used it.” Doug’s jaw bunched. “I hope to fuck the peacekeepers know to use a low concentration. That stuff is powerful. Then again, it may be inert after all this time.”
Unable to sit still, Elfrida jumped to her feet. “You have to do something.”
He shook his head. “We set them up to fail.”
“Yeah, obviously … Wait, what?”
“We knew they’d fail. You put a bunch of desperate office workers up against trained peacekeepers, they will lose. Doesn’t take a conflict analyst to know that.”
“So what, what, what was the point? Do you just like watching people die?”
She could not square this admission, or indeed Doug’s morose demeanor, with the visionary optimism she’d been so impressed by last time she was here.
“No one likes death and destruction. But it was decided that this was the best way to sever our ties with UNVRP.”
The headlines on the lefthand side of the screen continued to update.
President Declares Mercury Conflict ‘Unacceptable’ … Calls for UNVRP to be ‘Held to Account’ … Live! Interviews with Victims Reveal Anger at UNVRP …
“That’s Cydney,” Elfrida yelped.
She swiped at the headline.
Cydney’s face filled the screen. Her hair was all over the place, and she had a graze on one cheek, but she was gabbling fluently. “I’m in the lowest level of UNVRP HQ, known as the vault, where countless artifacts salvaged from the fall of the United States are stored. Among these dusty treasures, hundreds of civilians have taken refuge following the outbreak of violence—”
Elfrida sagged in relief. “Thank dog she’s safe,” she mumbled. “Is the vault separately pressurized? That means they’re not getting gunked ...”
Doug brushed his fingers across Cydney’s face. She faded out.
“This was none of my doing. I want you to understand that, Ms. Goto. I advocated against it, but I was overruled.”
“How could you be overruled? You’re the president!”
But he looked as shaken as she fe
lt. As if he meant it. As if he were sickened by the sight of people fighting and dying.
“No, I’m not,” he said hoarsely.
“You’re not what?”
“Not the president. Just the director of mining operations.”
“Huh?”
Doug twitched. “Excuse me,” he said, rising. “I’ll be right back.” He went into the cabin.
Baffled, Elfrida fidgeted. The day had grown brighter. It was going to be a beautiful morning in Mt. Gotham. She could hear that odd background noise she’d noticed on her first visit. A murmuring sound, like a train full of people, punctuated by electronic yodels.
Doug came back out of the cabin. He sat down next to her on the glider. “Sorry about that,” he smiled. “Where were we?”
She scooted away from him. “You were explaining that you set Vlajkovic and company up to fail, so that UNVRP would be discredited, and probably the Venus Project will be cancelled, and dog knows how many people are already dead, and ….”
“And you wanted to know why we all can’t just get along. Well, Ms. Goto, I have to tell you that first of all, the answer is human nature, and secondly, this company ain’t sharing shit with the motherfucking UN.”
Elfrida flinched as if he’d struck her.
“It was the UN that destroyed the United States of America. My daddy tried to play nice with you folks, signing that deal with UNVRP, but you know what, Ms. Goto? Screw that reconciliation shit.”
This new, bad-tempered Doug finger-snapped the screen back on. Blue berets were herding EVA-suited rebels into Life Support Operations, forcing them to remove their helmets. Elfrida spotted Vlajkovic. A peacekeeper pointed at the body of Dr. Seth, yelled at Vlajkovic, slapped him in the face.
“You folks can be pretty brutal when the mood takes you,” Doug said.
“Yes,” Elfrida said. “And I can tell you right now you’re not going to get away with this. I’ve already transmitted your confession to Earth!” she bluffed.
“With what? You’re as clean as a baby. No implants whatsoever. Scanned you last time you were here.”
“That’s illegal,” Elfrida said weakly.
“According to whose laws? You’re not in UN territory anymore, Ms. Goto.”
The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3) Page 15